Four years after their debut, Paradise Cinema return with another genre blending project on ‘returning, dream’.
This eight-track set features many of the hallmarks of that 2020 album, with dense West-African polyrhythms, cycling drones and a penchant for blending sounds and influences. Leader Jack Wyllie – Portico Quartet’s saxophonist – takes that further this time, aided by regular collaborators Khadim Mbaye, Tons Sambe and Laurence Pike.
Paradise Cinema embraces aspects of the ‘fourth world’ music approach of trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell, marrying separate traditions such as the West African percussion favoured by Wyllie with electronic sounds to create something new.
Master percussionist Mbaye plays sabar drums here – instruments of the Wolof people of Senegal. Sambe plays tamma, the talking drum of the same region. However, this release takes the project away from emphasis on the rhythms from Senegalese Mbalax music to a more fluid approach that nods towards everyone from American minimalist Terry Riley and Japanese ambient innovator Midori Takada to Don Cherry.
Album opener a morning in the near future sets the tone with its combination of new age elements like water sounds against hypnotic percussion, synth swells and Wyllie’s delicate flute leads.
Title track returning, dream is a woozy mix of hypnotic synthetic washes and percussive elements that seems to evoke the light of dawn and the potential redemption of a new day. Elsewhere tide also seamlessly merges the organic with the synthetic while showing the clear influence from Terry Riley.
Nowhere home offers a tonal shift into darker and more ponderous territory. Wyllie’s sax calls out over a marching thud, I believe from a Tamma drum pitched down, and ominous chords. Fluttering synths gradually take over with a cascade of sound that offers some sense of resolution.
On night search, the album’s euphoric peak, distorted guitar, synth lines and propulsive drumming create an intoxicating bed of sonics for Wyllie’s sax work. It’s an emotional high point on a record that wanders through a series of moods. The listener is left with end, setting – a short outro with fuzzy distorted chords that eventually give way to white noise before petering out. It feels a fitting end to this utterly ethereal and somewhat psychedelic record.
Explorative, innovative and moody. And recommended.
Release Date, 13 September 2024
