Infantjoy - Where The Night Goes (2005)

Infantjoy is the creation of James Banbury (of The Auteurs) and British music journalist Paul Morley. Where The Night Goes is definitely a cerebral album, but one which is never pretentious, and which is also eminently listenable. These qualities echo those of its inspiration (whose work is heard 'haunting' the album), Erik Satie.

Musically, the album is - well - I'd say downbeat electronica if that didn't sound like something you'd play in a trendy cafe, which this work is emphatically not. There are glitch influences, occasional elements of a harsher, semi-industrial sound, and also, among the other non-vocal tracks, a cover of Japan's Ghosts (a song which also makes an appearance on another favourite album of mine, Tricky's Maxinquaye). Atmospherically, the music is reminiscent of Japan - dark (or, perhaps, 'grey' in the very bet sense) and understated without being melodramatic or angst-ridden. Satie is here, too, in the nature of the music, in its complexity and elements of the experimental without being 'difficult'; with a concern for form, for loops, repetition and return, for motifs and themes; and in the way in which it lends itself equally to close listening or to being played as 'incidental' or 'ambient' music. A soundtrack to late afternoon, on a rainy day, reading snatches of theory in between drifting in and out of sleep...

Arthur Russell - Calling Out of Context

Arthur Russell is one of those musicians who I came across only recently, and couldn't imagine why I hadn't encountered years ago. Frequently name-checked in lists of music by eccentrics and outsiders, Russell (1952-1992) was known as a disco musician and also a cellist who collaborated with such countercultural giants as Philip Glass, David Byrne and Allen Ginsberg. In February, a documentary film on Russell, Wild Combination, was released.

Calling Out Of Context, a 2004 compilation of Russell's more dance-oriented work, is the first of his albums that I've come across, and I'm absolutely addicted to it. I was surprised to find that it was a compilation, given the way in which it hangs together perfectly as an album, both musically and in terms of emotional palette.

The album consist of synthy, dance-beat-oriented, reverb-drenched eighties art-pop melancholia. A reviewer's description, 'New Order meets Nick Drake,' isn't too far off the mark (given the general inadequacy of shorthand description by comparison). Though there's a definite pop flavour, and echoes of more pop-oriented eighties acts like New Order or even the more introspective moments of Jimmy Somerville's work, the songs are not pop songs as such; rather than traditional verse-chorus structures the listener is presented with sometimes-inaudible, haunting phrases drifting in and out of a musical landscape. Indeed, rather than a collection of songs, it's a landscape that's created here, or perhaps a marine-scape (given the frequent references to water and the feeling of the liminal, of surface and depth); a place in which one finds oneself adrift...