album // Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle
The second album from the erstwhile Heaven 17 member Martyn Ware and Erasure's Vince Clarke reminds me chiefly of two other albums. The first is an obscure (as opposed to Obscure, since the following release was on Warners) CD by Brian Eno entitled The Shutov Assembly. This was a collection of Eno's drifting, meditative compositions, each of which was named after a place, with each place name or location consisting of 9 characters. Musically, Clarke and Ware's sequel to Pretentious shares the same spirit as said Eno album (as it does, I suppose, to Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 2 - which I listened to in the same week as the Eno album - and some of the live albums the genius guitarist and Eno collaborator Robert Fripp put out in the 1990s). What do I mean by this? Only that a similar set of sounds is used throughout, where the differences are emphasised by varying tonality and chord structure. This is also similar to Eno's album, in so far as it is 'thematic', with each of the tracks labelled with a particular colour and prescribed mood.
As with all new albums I buy these days that are deemed 'unacceptable' for listening to in our lounge, I listened to this on a portable CD while on the train from Milton Keynes to work in London. This had two advantages. Firstly, the CD was put together using the same Lake Huron signal processor as on Pretentious, and in order to listen to the spatial depth and 3D panning, headphones are required to fully appreciate the full immersive quality of the music. The second benefit of listening to this disc away from the home is that I never take the CD case with me, and thus I never know the name of a song I'm listening to, particularly on recently-purchased CDs. Song names can be a burden at times, especially on ambient music - they force associations and evoke a mood prior to listening which is really hard to shake off. Eno's album above is case in point - by giving each track the name of a place, you naturally make certain assumptions, about the place, environment etc. The Aphex album attempted to redress this by using unidentifiable swatches of images instead of names, hence freeing the listener from burdensome heuristic linkage. Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle, named bizarrely after a Captain Scarlet toy, attributes not only colours to each track, but also a situational 'anchor', eg 'You Are In The Womb' for track 3 ('Red') - shades of Alvin Lucier anyone?. Not having the CD booklet in front of me while listening freed me up from linking the music from a given mood, allowing me to simply listen. What a relief. (Plus, I should point out that I'm 'colour confused', which is the new PC term for colour blindness, so God knows how I'd fare.)
The second album this reminds me of is called My Wise Yellow Rug by Luke Slater's Seventh Plain from about 10 years ago, and back when the boy Slater was busy shifting records via several labels (this one was released on GPR). I bought this on the strength of one line I read in a review in either the NME or Melody Maker. It described the fourth track ('Excalibur's Radar') as sounding like 'Vince Clarke playing the theme from Bladerunner'. As it happens, it actually did sound like that, and ever since then I have yearned for Clarke to record an album in that vein; Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle is the album I always imagined - deep swells of synth chords shifting around the stereo mix, fragile, slowly-evolving melodies, distant heartbeat ryhthms, bird calls and waves crashing onto shore. There's also a Vangelis reference here, in so far as an instrument similar to the icy harp chords from Bladerunner is used occasionally on some of the tracks. Strangely absent, though, are Vince's now-trademark analogue synth bubbles, and instead there is a digital sheen that is unexpected but not unwelcome - to fans of his work, you can still tell it's a Vince Clarke album. According to the sleeve notes, Clarke handled programming, while Ware produced and mixed the album. The work was originally part of a two-hour 'event' held at the Roundhouse in London in 2000.
I wanted to avoid using some of the cliches of music journalism in this review, wherein a small subset of nouns is rolled out when reviewing ambient albums - you know, words like 'chilled', 'drifting', 'ethereal' etc. The problem is, it is all of those things, so usage is unavoidable. It's simply beautiful, a welcome counterpoint to hectic commutes and life in the City. Your life needs this album.