Uitgebracht
February 2020
- What's this album about? Who knows. But its cryptic minimalism amounts to some of the duo's finest work.
- Ivan Smagghe is like a cigarette-smoking Sphinx. The Frenchman, long based in London, is voluble in interviews, but seems intent on explaining as little as possible. In Smagghe's RA Exchange he said describing your own music, as an artist, was "digging your own grave." Smagghe went on to say he cherished a write-up that described his It's A Fine Line project as "leaving you with more questions than it does answers with regards to its creators' imaginations."
Even compared to the whacked-out disco rock of that project, Smagghe & Cross, the French DJ's partnership with the film composer and pianist Rupert Cross, is a head-scratcher. Their first album for Vladimir Ivkovic's Offen Music, 2017's MA, verged on ambient noise, occasionally breaking for an impressionistic piano lament from Cross. The pair have also made a weirdo synth pop "hit" with Matthew Herbert and an album of oblique, synth-infused krautrock for Idle Press. Compared with all that, 1819, the duo's latest album, is a far more reserved affair. It's also a massive leap forward, and perhaps the most accomplished suite of music Smagghe has ever put his name on.
In keeping with this tight-lipped demeanor, when asked to walk through the record track-by-track for The Ransom Note, Smagghe and Cross dealt mostly in poetic abstractions, which leaves us to assess the music from a purely sonic perspective. The rhythms here are mostly limited to a bleak, sub-bass pulse. The mood vacillates wildly. The pitched-down voice of poet Adelle Stripe utters macabre verses about traipsing through a cathedral over queasy synths on "From Sacred Heart," which sounds like Coil addressing Salem's chopped-and-screwed fixation. But a couple tracks later, the mood turns beatific—the plaintive piano and subtle synth swell of "Somewhere In Time" is comparable to Hiroshi Yoshimura's Music For Nine Postcards.
But what's remarkable about 1819 is the duo's ability to scale convincing emotional peaks using a foundation of slight musical ideas. "Drain" takes the wispy synth-figure from the pair's Warden CA remix and turns it into a magisterial, plodding meditation that sounds like minimal synth take on transcendent psych rock. They employ the same trick on "Antheia," on which a diminutive burble is used as the basis for an epic synth piece.
That track feels like it could score the final, white-knuckle ascent in some mountaineering flick. Cross's formidable resume as a film composer, coupled with Smagghe's cinephile tendencies, must have led them to look to the emotional ebb and flow of great cinema as inspiration for 1819. Not only does the album sound like nothing they've done before, each song adopts its own emotional tenor, as though meant for a different character or device within some unknown plot. A hopeful denouement arrives just before curtains, with the woozy, Boards Of Canada-like "Le Soleil Levant."
Perhaps there's something to Smagghe's aversion to spelling things out. As a DJ and producer he's made methodical progress over a nearly 30-year career, working his way through deep house, dance rock, arpeggiator-fueled modern dark wave and his unmixed, "listening music" NTS shows. It's all led up to Smagghe & Crosse's novel combination of experimental, downtempo and soundtrack music.
Smagghe has always had one foot in, and one foot out of, whatever he's up to. He DJs clubs most weekends but refuses to produce functional tracks. He worked for Radio Nova and rubbed shoulders with a number of French Touch-adjacent house producers, but expressed distaste for the recent revival in '90s deep house styles. On 1819, this refusal to be fenced has paid off. If Smagghe's refusal to lay out his creative motivation has seemed Sphinx-like, the unclassifiable, beautiful 1819 renders him more like a chameleon.
Tracklist01. Monody
02. From Sacred Heart
03. Drain
04. Somewhere In Time
05. Antheia
06. That Remains To Be Seen
07. Lincolnshire Poacher
08. Le Soleil Levant