Jell says: “TS Eliot’s poems have always seemed particularly musical and lyrical to me. Not just in a rhythmical sense, but also in the romance of drama of his imagery. His marriage of the existential questions of modern humanity with more quotidien, occassionally comic anxieties (Do I dare to eat a peach?) is what, in some ways, i have always tried to do with my music”

In true modernist style, Proof Rock takes snippets of TS Eliot’s poetry and places them in an strange context, making them appear afresh. Eliot’s words combine with half-step beats, futuristic lit-pop angles, trembling bass and the occasional breakneck heavy guitar to startling effect.

The first proper Talk Less, Say More release since Jell moved London, the city haunts the music in the same way Leeds lurked behind the sound of Go Lucky. Obviously the nod towards dubstep is part of this. But so also is TS Eliot himself, who was fascinated with London and the way it amplified the philosophical questions of our age.

More Information - Listen Now - Free Download

This release is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The companion piece to last year’s critically acclaimed Go Lucky, IDKWIAIDKWID is an excellent record its own right. Take the opener ‘You Were Right About Me’. Jell’s hasn’t written a better pop song: a propulsive, catchy electro number, nintendo beeps and surprisingly, Earth inspired slow guitar. See also Baby Animal’s dark but fond ballad or Still As A Rivers reflective ascending guitar figure. Will You Be Me Widow?, a story of trenches and doomed love, is backed by gracious 80s atmospherics. This would have been a tragedy left on the cutting room floor.

The remixes here are excellent, shading songs anew. Pebbles In A Flood highlights Sensations Spring’s ‘innocent like pebbles in a flood’ to evocative effect, the Topaz mix of The Battle Of Borodino brings clattering military drums warming the original’s deep melancholy.

For fans of The Knife, M83′s Saturdays=Youth, Junior Boys, The Chap, the decade begining in 1980.

More Information - Listen Now - Free Download

This release is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

In 1908 John McTaggart Ellis wrote ‘The Unreality of Time’ which argued successfully that time is a contradictory concept and hence unreal. ‘It’s About Time’ is a record like this. Both McTaggart and TLSM write about time and some of the absurd things about it. Both are rooted firmly in a tradition, here hip-hop, with McTaggart, philosophy. But both bend the starting points of these to a wonderfully skewed, weird and utterly unique conclusion. Let me explain.

Vs 29 extracts from Eugene Onegin, a rumination on life and creativity. Oh.. worries about the sadness of melted snow men. By the time we get to Kicking Logic, we know we have something unprecedented. Over a g-funk whistle and popping sliced human beat box, we hear the implications of the multiple worlds of quantum mechanics for having a party, first entry in a genre called Schrödinger’s rap. A Rose In Winter is the opening part of a dark fairy story of kings and frozen princesses. Call Me Old Fashioned is an audacious display of lyrical dexterity and sheer imagination set over a sole metronomic beat. In a very strange time-signature. And it is wonderful, crazy stuff.

But as with all his music, Talk Less, Say More effortlessly connects the abstract with the concrete. The centrepiece tribute to Ludwig Boltzmann’s tragic death is devastating and truly beautiful, a melancholy Bone Thugs-n-Harmony reminding us that ‘disorder is exponentially increasing’. St Patrick’s Well features the most heartsick vocoder since O Superman. Can it be that it was all so simple then? The answer is no.

This is certainly hip-hop, but not as we know it. It’s like Timbaland glitched up and drunk on weirdness reading a science textbook while feeling a bit down. It’s like a simple argument that explains that time doesn’t exist. In short: mind-bending stuff.

See also: Sa-Ra Creative Partnership, eDIT, Clouddead and everything on Anticon records, Kool Keith’s many projects, Bone Thugz-n-Harmony, Company Flow, MF Doom, Anti-pop Consortium

More Information - Listen Now - Free Download

This release is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

This is Talk Less, Say More’s most focussed, emotionally literate and complex work to date, putting personal, honest reflection into an ingenuous and eclectic hypermodern setting. Pushing his distinctive vocal to the front and singing on every track for the first time, the record unblinkingly explores love’s sunlit glories as well as the strange chasms opened when it departs.

The Battle of Borodino updates the neon lights of 80s electropop with wide-eyed Italo synths, fuzzy guitar riffs and vocoders. Up close, Far Away combines deft lyricism and folk warmth with relentless thud of the Berlin techno minimalism, in one moment laying an explosion of shuddering breaks beautifully alongside looping guitars. Smeared impressionistic cello in Sensations Spring meld seamlessly with a Timbaland bassline, halting IDM drums and contemplation of the passing of things. Perhaps a hinge of the album, Roots Alive pushes Vangelis’ synthetic choirs over the snap and throb of a broken house beat, thrusting guitar chops over childhood recollection.

The closeness and beautiful restraint of All Dressed Up Like Love reads like a confessional – “I have been thinking about fear and the way it has of showing up around here/All dressed up like love”. Drawing the album to a close, Life In Cold Blood is a thrilling summation, shimmering bells trilling over a tender dub, a gorgeous conclusion to a gorgeous record. The yearning mantra “We’ll put our hoods up and walk in the rain” is perhaps a look to hope, maybe nothing more than a glance to acceptance, the open conclusion to so many unanswered questions.

For fans of Junior Boys, Subtle, The Knife, Timbaland as well as Leonard Cohen, the anarchist pop spirit of Giorgio Moroder. Minimal techno, pound shop electro.

More Information - Listen Now - Free Download - Buy

This release is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Om!‚ This syllable is this whole world.
Mandukya Upanishad

There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres.
Pythagorus

Thus all music – since its thought is upon melody and rhythm – must be the earthly representation of the music there is in the rhythm of the Ideal Realm.
Plotinus

There is a hierarchy of number from the One Himself down through the numeri. All music contains in some way the divine patterning.
Augustine

Two obliquely named tracks, each half an hour long, stretch out like vast oceans. Centred around variations of a single omnipresent and pulsating note, the record rewards patience, attention to detail and your own quietness. It is a breathtakingly gorgeous meditation on distance and time, as well as sound itself. The listener is cast adrift in a gradually evolving organic soundscape of glacial echoes, smeared synthesisers, glittering electronics and distant chimes, while the sound weaves into your environment, becoming truly ambient. Simply put: this is beautiful work.

More Information - Listen Now - Free Download

This release is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

It’s about time. And also space. And also loss. Loss that is the result of either of those things.

The End (Has To Start Somewhere) is about hip-hop as the apex of evolution and the profound absurdity of eternal recurrence (maybe). Kicking Logic considers parallel dimensions and ponders the mystery Schrödinger’s cat over a popping g-funk whistle slice up. Time Flies dwells on life’s glorious contingency and the death of snowmen. The Quarterbeats plays the idea of time signatures as being the signatures of time qua time.

Yet it is not all speculative metaphysical hi-jinks. St’s Patrick’s Well features the most sublimely melancholic vocoder chorus since Laurie Anderson’s avant-hit ‘O Superman’. Oh No is a rapped lament for childhood trees and opportunities missed. Things end with a dark turn: Arctic Fox is a beatless midnight stalk, that recalls the collaboration between Kode9 and Space Ape in its sinister ambiguity – “I never knew a moral to keep me warm at night”, spits our anti-hero, while the colossal darkness and icy ambience whips around him.

In short, this simply is brilliant.

Lyrics

Artwork designed by Wayne Pashley.

More Information - Listen Now - Free Download

This release is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.