Various Artists
Searchlight Moonbeam
Efficient Space
/
2023
CD
12.99/16.99
ES032CD
2LP
27.99
ES032LP
Incl. insert
Incl. VAT plus shipping / Orders from outside the EU are exempt from VAT
Tracklist
1Bo Harwood & John Cassavetes – No One Around To Hear It
2Chen Ming Chang – Rainwater
3Bhairavi Raman & Nanthesh Sivarajah – Bittersweet Reflections
4The King Of Luxembourg – Poptones
5Slapp Happy – Is It You
6OG Jigg – Jesus Is My Jam
7Klang – As It Is
8Scala – Fuser
9Soft Location – Let The Moon Get Into It
10Gyeongsu – YZOBEL (feat CROCHE) (feat CROCHE)
11Omerta – Moments In Love
12Kasumi Trio – Cabbage Butterfly
13Un – Fast Money Blues
14Delphine Dora – V
15Harry Plunket-Greene – The Hurdy-Gurdy Man

»Searchlight Moonbeam« is the new narrative compilation from Time Is Away (Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney) whose eponymous monthly NTS Radio shows, tinctured fusions of fugitive sounds and reverie-inducing archival speech, have won them an ardent following. It follows from the London-based duo’s »Ballads«, a remarkable driftwerk released on A Colourful Storm in 2022. 
 »Searchlight Moonbeam« is an autumnal dreamscape, intimate and vespertine, pensive and irresolute. An imagined community where differences drop off and resonances emerge – between Maher Shalal Hash Baz affiliates Kasumi Trio, Taiwanese score composer Chen Ming Chang whose »Rainwater« (written for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1986 film »Dust In The Wind«) is exquisitely heartbroken, and the plangent improvisations of self-taught French pianist Delphine Dora. 
 Revelations are frequent: the bedsit isolationism of Bo Harwood and John Cassavetes’ »No One Around to Hear It« (from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie); the narked minimalism of Klang (an early 2000s band formed by ex-Elastica guitarist and featuring prize-winning experimental novelist Isabel Waidner on bass); the etude-grooves and echoic wobble of below-the-radar French avant-gardists Omertà; the beautiful, plaintively dubby ‘Is It You?’ by Slapp Happy; a psych-tinged reimagining of PiL’s »Poptones« by Simon Fisher Turner (one half of Deux Filles, and here, recording for él as The King of Luxembourg) that's as perverse as the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats. 
 Searchlight Moonbeam is the musical analog of an Italo Calvino novel or a medieval fable. Associative, intuitive, borderless. Emotional and mysterious. Endowed with the tactility of Braille. A private language that is both unknowable and understood. It is a record of the seasons, for the seasons.

2023 marks the tenth anniversary of Time Is Away’s first broadcast. Featuring an evocative essay by writer Jeremy Atherton Lin and disarming cover art by Penny Davenport, Searchlight Moonbeam showcases Rollo and Tierney’s still-unrivalled talent for gloaming melodies, disques du crépuscule and ensorcelled storytelling.