- A pleasantly confusing transmission from a London label to watch.
- Jolly Discs, a London label run by Guy Gormley and Rory Gleeson, has spent the last few years releasing pleasantly confusing music made from familiar elements. Most of the label's projects involve Gormley, who has previously released more typical, left-of-centre house on labels like Born Free. But the aesthetic he's pursued with Jolly Discs projects like RAP, Never and Special Occasion combines techno, post-punk and obscure '80s pop to modern and bizarre effect.
While Gormley's strongest projects, RAP and Never, see him working with a vocalist, Enchante, like Actress and Burial, is liminal, experimental dance music inspired by grey London. Mind In Camden 2 begins with a GPS giving directions to Hackney Downs; the whole tape is full of field recordings of speeding cars, brusque transit employees and rain. On the excellent "No One's Arms But My Own," Gormley goes off-piste, crafting a low-key psych track from acoustic guitar and queasy synths while a pitched-down voice reads bleak poetry for the city: "To live in the shadows... To walk in the open when I choose / And to die in no one's arms but my own / Yes, that too is mine."
Elsewhere, Gormley tests the limits of dry repetition ("Vigil") and revisits the "ambient hardstyle" he explored on RAP's 2019 album Export. By the time we reach the concluding and only straight-ahead house track, "Rise To Infinity," it feels like we've taken a bleary journey through London. While plenty of oddball producers make music that replicates the muffled kick you hear when walking up to the club, Mind In Camden 2 is music for the lonesome bus ride there.
Tracklist01. Enter
02. Mind In Camden
03. Caught In A Dream
04. FD
05. St. Michael
06. No One's Arms But My Own
07. Vigil
08. Cleanzing Interlude
09. Rise To Infinity