Anjou, Epithymía (2017)

Where bought: this feels like I got it from Rise in Worcester. It's new but I don't remember travelling specifically to buy it. Rather, it was a pay-day impulse purchase. Or something like that.

There can't be too many people in the world as enamoured of 90s ambient/rock group Labradford as me. They were an inscrutable bunch, making what Neil Kulkarni called 'melted songs' rather than 'ambient' music. That is to say - there were often vocals, structures, and thematic developments - only there were often buried in the soundworld. If you're going to get one, try their S/T record from 1996.

Labradford began as Mark Nelson (guitar) and Carter Brown (synth) before adding Robert Donne from Breadwinner on bass guitar for their second album A Stable Reference. Anjou is Nelson and Donne - there have been no sightings, musically for Brown since Labradford dissolved - reunited.

Epithymía doesn't return to Labradford's patient, practised sound of gentle interlocking of music physically reproduced: this is more typical of contemporary ambient music inasmuch as it sounds heavily processed on computers, artifically degraded in parts, with a real emphasis on crafting a deep sonic texture. A track like 'Culcinae' could soundtrack a Bill Viola installation, or the drowning of a ship.

What I hugely appreciated about Donne joining Labradford was how his bass (sometimes an 8-string, from the sound of it) gave structure and contours to pieces that were basically 'cool sounds, repeated'. I'm going to guess that that was part by design, and partly because Donne comes out of Richmond, VA's storied rock tradition. A decade and a half on from Labradford's demise, this feels more like Donne going along with Nelson's aesthetic developed in his solo project Pan American.

Perhaps I'm just disappointed that it isn't Labradford Return (I am). It's just personal preference but when I listen to 'Soucouyant', which attempts to work up a cool Cluster-style vibe, I can hear the computer work sweetening what could otherwise be a cool vintage-synth jam to the end of the highway. I've always preferred to hear flawed playing than manipulated perfection, even though a computer can do a great many things that acoustic performance cannot.

Nonetheless, Epithymía is a peaceful glide for 4 x 15 minute sides (at 45rpm). It is pretty good stuff - 'An Empty Bank' has a cool haunted saxophone and industrial thrumming, like a demo tape for the third series of Twin Peaks - and it was nice to dig out for this project. Through the 21st century electro-acoustic music and ambient music have developed to the point of unremarkability, in the main, so it is good that Anjou are ahead of the chasing pack on Bandcamp.

I'll probably keep it, unless I sense that someone really wants it and there's a demand for it. Right now I could make back what I paid for it...I'd rather have the record to be honest.