Devotional Music For Invisible Cities

26 Nov 2014 — Richard Greenan

With their aphorism "music with stories to tell", Dramatic Records have presented music from a variety of oddballs over the years - coffee-addled, corporate nutjobs, duplicitous Czech entrepreneurs, misty-eyed anthropologists and unhinged swimming gurus (?!).

Their latest offering, then, seems conspicuously devoid of protagonist and accompanying backstory. Even the title of the album is hollow. Does Invisible Cities point to the Calvino book of the same name, itself an exercise in styles of the imaginable? The artwork, too, is laced with baffling cyphers, Escher-esque false turns and never-ending staircases...

Musically, "Love Of Pleasure Is All" is warming, unplaceable, devotional - the end credits of a civilisation-building dynasty, or murmurs from a nightclub in the middle of some Final Fantasy VII desert.

Invisible Cities is out soon on Dramatic Records.