Released 17th Sept.
"Anything these guys do is brilliant in my opinion, so you're not going to get anything but a big recommendation here. Their songwriting abilities are second to none and the way they tug at the heartstrings with deliciously melancholy melodies is delightful. Instrumentation is stunning, the vocals are breathy and gorgeous and if you enjoyed the 'Harps Old Master' album at all this is a must. Both sides are ace and this is more than worthy of your attention. Definite recommendation!" - Smallfish, Sept 2007
The product of musical internet ‘dating’, London multi-instrumentalists Keiron Phelan and David Sheppard encountered the inscrutable Franco-Italian Niandra Ladies via MySpace in 2006 and were immediately drawn to their mercurial electro-acoustic textures. The Londoners - the duo behind State River Widening and a critically acclaimed 2006 album (Harps Old Master) under their own names for the Leaf label - proposed a four-way collaboration. The peripatetic Ladies, now berthed in Gothenburg and Barcelona respectively, responded favourably, and soon files were whizzing back and forth across the European mainland, with Phelan and Sheppard wedding their acoustic guitars, woodwind, strings, Fender Rhodes and percussion to the Ladies’ ambient sculptures. Vocals, courtesy of the Ladies’ English pal Laura Sharpe and Phelan/Sheppard’s sometime Spanish collaborator Ines Naranjo, were spliced in, David and Keiron mixing the polyglot smorgasbord into two gleaming tracks in a studio beneath a ukulele shop in London’s Spitalfields.
Games Of Position is based on a recitation from an old anthology of board games; it’s enigmatic, melodious vocals meticulously interleaved with fluttering electronics, plangent acoustic guitars and swallow-diving violas. This is elegant baroque pop music as re-imagined by outsider artists and, honestly, it sounds like no on else.
Casino Lisboa is a fizzing atmospheric detour – equally alluring if tending toward the abstract. It proffers a kind of free jazz folk-ambient landscape – Miles Davis meets John Cage in an Alice Coltrane dreamscape – all of it judiciously decorated with the French horn of Thomas Allard.