‘Clever Dog‘, the next album from the Accidental Meetings‘ camp, comes from Bristol-based producer memotone, a consumate sound artist and musician with past releases for Diskotopia, Black Acre, and with supporting production on Batu’s debut album.
Outlandish fragmented dub, ever the callsign of Accidental Meetings’, is present on ‘Clever Dog‘, but perhaps more potent are memotone’s ushering in of jazz parallels — rolling, warped melodies on piano, upright-bass lurching haphazardly through lax drums lost in ambient overgrowth, spectral brass painting shadowplays in fog.
Radiance meets greyscale, a duality of desaturated glimmering that arrests the listener in a high-contrast pool of sound; organic, un-digital, yet unerringly derived from decades of digital bloodlines, meeting like tributaries of a great river, collecting in a Bristolian crucible. An echo of Hassell’s Fourth World-building, but an utterly individual sound, resonating like a valued memory resurfacing at last.
‘Sporeprint‘ — a method of divining the edibility of a mushroom — reminds most vividly of Hassell’s latest and last full album ‘Seeing Through Sound‘, in a rich evocation of unseen fauna, flora, and imagined landscapes. A journey through mis-remembered foreign lands, trails lost and found, visions detailing themselves in the mist, but only in the periphery of sight; lost as soon as sought-after.
‘Clever Dog’ is scheduled for release 23 September via Accidental Meetings. Order a copy from Bandcamp.
TRACKLIST
1. A Shape in the Pond
2. Day Slipping
3. Leagues Under
4. The Bridge and the Bend
5. The River Slows to a Stop
6. Lorry Driver
7. Sporeprint
8. Desert Zone
9. Bloose
10. Walker’s Stone
11. Birds of the Rock
12. We Forgot the Way
13. Susan’s Corner