There’s often something eerie about childsong. Perhaps it’s the common use of such singing in horror films, but to hear a lone child’s voice singing, slightly-off key, against a creeping, unnerving sonic backdrop, it almost inevitably draws goose pimples. It’s but a fleeting moment on this sprawling 24-track work, but there are a number of instances of children’s voices captured on tape and incorporated within the fabric of ‘Space & Time’, a haunting and often ghostly album, heavy with echoes of the voices of the past.
Whispers clamour on ‘Shell-Like Cornice’, and elsewhere, an audience erupts in gales of laughter which dissipate and are replaced by lugubrious strings, their panging sadness a reminder of times, people and places gone. The applause fades. The empty space remains.
There’s an off-kilter carnival-meets-Dr -Who vibe to ‘Mouth Popsicle Explosion’ which seeps into spaghetti western territory. Instructional recordings – the happy clapping ‘Happy Clappy’ seems curiously at odds with the world as we now experience it, and snippets of dialogue fade into the dust motes which hang in a shaft of sunlight in a long-empty room on many of the tracks.
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Despite the quirky, clever-clever track titles and numerous forays into the domains of what one might call light audio entertainment, the album’s atmosphere often creeps into the darker corners of the psyche, and isn’t always a comfortable or easy listen. Deux Filles - Colin Lloyd Tucker and Simon Fisher Turner, reconvening after some 33 years still know how to make music that can have a tangible – if indefinable – effect
‘Time & Space’, in its very being and by virtue of its emergence effectively transcends both time and space. It’s an album that reaches far into the psyche and subliminally probes the depths, engaging with the long-forgotten and the repressed. It’s music that operates on another level.
Deux Filles Online
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