Retep Folo and Dorothy Moskowitz – The Afterlife

Buried Treasure

Trailing on the shirt tails of last year’s lathe-cut seven inch Afterlife EP comes a whole album’s worth that doesn’t disappoint.

Pleasantly parading around the head like the cover of an unread novel that fertilizes the imagination before you’ve even taken in a single word, The Afterlife’s treacly glow sticks to you in chorused warmth and glittery keystrokes, the occasional word-form whirling its architecture like an intoxicated hex.

Retep Folo’s attention to detail is superb, smooths and excites in equal measure, lances the cushioning cloud that folds gently around you with a curious lustre, nibbled in melodics plucked from another time, a distant analogue world that doesn’t seem to exist any more.

Like a pre-experimental Scott Walker, he sand-castles a fairytale-like atmosphere throughout, a sliding tonality that curls kittenish in your head, sending zithered zebras shivering up your spine, further expanded by Dorothy Moskowitz’s vocal abstracts and scattered poetics.

The post-rock like injection of percussives on “Beast” are ace, given over to a noir-clustered insistence wrapping around this ghostly child’s voice. A voice that’s sprinkled around this album’s fourteen tracks like an answerphone from beyond, interspersed with Dorothy and Retep’s time-tied contrast. Dorothy’s vocals slipshod with commercial radio blurs on “Running Time”: “Dare to breathe the air before time runs out”, she warns as Retep’s deep voice throws out an alluring contrast to hers, before falling into a propeller’s hum / pendulum chime.

It’s a rarefied soak, the shades of which are in constant flux — its fairground aromas lost to a harpsichord-hitched whir of clocks. Motifs of ‘the hourglass empty’ permeate, ferment across the album’s span as moments of beauty rainbow its alcoves. The halcyon-haloed softness of instrumentation that’s always easy on the ear but full of captivating detail. The gambolling gaiety of “Water Streams” is particularly dreamy; then there’s that shoegazery skim of “Sun” that oozes with the warm-skin promise of summer.

The constantly shifting sands of the album dealing you a ’60s spy pastiche to sci-fi off into a fairyland glitterati. An immersive glaze in which Dorothy’s voice seems really at home, whether in breathy waves of vocal abstraction on “The Awakening Of Love In The Spring” or poetically pulling you over the skiffling Hawaiian-ness on “The Moon”, she fits glove-like; shimmers vitality in all that found-sound intrigue.

The latter part documents a five-part suite to the Black Hill that starts in the ceremonial swell of “The Great Horned Owl Deep In The Forest”, then delves into the drone-soaked descent of “Raging Wildfires”, a witchy corona caught in a gong’s sustained wake with some lovely snared reverberations. An expanding canvas that eases into the modulated ping pong of “Sleeping Hill” to be waltz-warmed in dissecting circulars.

A lush oval of orchestration that undulates, interrogates the space to fill you with its soft-petalled narrative that’s all strawberry mouthed and velvety, quickly overtaken by the ominous Hammer House voiceover of “The Watchers” that fades into the final part of the suite, “Falling Skies”. A dirge-tastic treat as its satelliting pulse jelly-fishes through inner space, has Dorothy’s fragmented words dancing its reddish glow. “Don’t leave me … down in the darkness”, she echoes as the organ-like chorals harmonically stab the splashy percussion.

A wish cast into the eternal that leaves the title track’s slow tonal wash to baptise you in the murmuring meaning of her repeating word-weave and lullabying reprise. Without doubt one of the best things Buried Treasure have released so far.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-