The original private pressing on the band’s own Sunshine Series and the subsequent re-release on Savage Republic’s Independent Projects label are much sought after, but collector’s cache of this album is secondary to its musical value - it really is a classic. Working with acoustic guitars, clarinet, rhythm box, keyboards, singing bowls, pixiephone and subtle processing, this is gloriously DIY, melancholic, avant-garde pastoralism that connects the dots between Pentangle, Gareth Williams, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Dif Juz and Robert Wyatt.
Although Peter Banks sadly died in 2013, this new studio album features some of his work which has never been released until now. On 10th August 2010 he and David Cross got together for an afternoon of improvisation and all guitar and violin parts are from that time. Banks had expressed his desire for this music to one day be made available, so over the last few years Cross asked some friends to become involved and help in making this album a reality…
Ian D Hawgood - Tents And Hills (2008). Written and produced between October 2007 and June of 2008, this release actually already appeared in part (its first four tracks) as an EP on luvsound in March 2008, after which Hawgood created four additional pieces to go along with them. Like much of Hawgood's material, "Tents and Hills" merges purely synthetic and natural elements into drone meditation settings of sometimes recognizable and sometimes abstract character (the mass of sound streaming through “No Clouds” could be a piano chord stretched out indefinitely, for example, or it could be something else entirely)…
In There Is No Love, Davies, Sylvian and Wastell offer a sparse and brooding setting of Bernard Marie Koltès’ text – part of a longer play from 1985 - in which its two characters, named only the Dealer and Buyer, are barely more than ciphers, their ghostly figures enacting a mysterious negotiation in a crepuscular world where emotional engagement has departed in place of commodified exchange (“There is no love”.) What, exactly, is being bought and sold is never revealed, yet Sylvian’s careful enunciation bristles with implicit violence and desire.