Bloomer Records (label)
28 July 2022 (released)
28 July 2022
If you were to imagine, engineer, conjure up a collection of songs and sounds that addressed the world of collapsing contexts, dissolving boundaries and borderless territories (on a cultural level, at least) then you might (if you’re lucky) end up with FAST DE’s debut album, ‘Sight Inside’. A miasma of avant-garde MOR, King Crimson-esque text-plorations, a bric-o-bracollage of beats, breaks and breakdowns. And more.
Dutch (de)composer, mellow-fellow Daniel Eskens, re-channels his pasts, plunders his presents and steals from his soon-to-be futures into a melting pot-pourri of progressive pop, transgressive trip-hop, impressive indie-jazz rock.
Delving into the dreamlike playground of a childhood since passed into scrapbook fragments, Eskens has described ‘Miss Trutti Finally Found Her Gem’ as a ‘musical scream’, a lament to the footloose and fancy-freedoms of youthful yore, a hazy hark to unfiltered happenings and unplanned existences.
Whether rearranging genres and syncopated selectronica, it’s a soundtrack to somewhere, something, sometime. ‘AH’ revokes The Shadows at their most leisurely and loose; the titular ‘Sight Inside’ and ‘Was Dat’ journey inwards towards the inner-mechanics of the mind all amiss, instru-mental shakedowns with closing codas of exquisite equilibrium.
‘Good to get lost’ is all wonky waves, a slightly off-kilter, just out-of-synch psy-chic-edelia. A sonic Situationist dérive through the nooks and crannies of the innermost thoughts, piecing together the right path through perception and the pleasurable properties of being unmoored and point-less. Consider it a musical compatriot to author Rebecca Solnit’s essays on ‘the issues of wandering and the uses of the unknown’.
‘WT.M.W.O.M.’ is maximum-minimalism, a steady pace-maker of picked (heart) strings, all flicked bass pickings.
Throughout ‘Sight Inside’ displays distant echoes of Pearls Before Swine’s ornate nursey rhyme time-signatures and Slapp Happy’s head-expanding razz-pizzazz yet its modernist flex on complexity is a delight of dexterity.
