Hums and metallic drones scrape beneath the sounds of a crowd, shouting. They don’t sound too happy. Jeering. Building tension. It’s quite a contrast to the cover image, which shows a perfect beach holiday scene with deckchairs and parasols, a cloudless sky that’s seemingly without blemish… but wait, where are the people? The chairs and towels are all empty. Something’s wrong. Horribly wrong. And this is perhaps the starting point of ‘R&R’ – which certainly isn’t about rest ‘n’ relaxation.
There are three ‘Covertures’ – collages of found sound intercut with drones and dissonance and segments of anti-narrative. The album’s feature piece, the 30-minute ‘Varosha (Disco Debris)’ is shudderingly bleak and broken. In the distance, fractured fragments of old-school disco and dancehall tunes, echoes of bumping club-nights lost to time and memory.
|
More of a horror than a holiday, the snippets of the ordinary and the familiar take on different, more sinister shades against the backdrop of dilapidation and songs play to empty rooms occupied only by dust and ghosts.
‘The One Hundred Words’ creeps deeper into the darkness, a barely audible rumble that groans and grumbles over a full 21 minutes. There are no party tunes here, and ‘Resorts & Ruins’ is at times quite a challenging listen. It is, however, magnificently executed, and superbly presented, and the postcards that accompany the disc are a nice touch.
Yannis Kyriades Online
|
