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IMAGES FROM A PARALLLEL WORLD This challenged what I am used to from electronic music and it took a few plays before I warmed to this. Once I did, I kept going back….. The melodies are sweeter and more “chocolate box” than I am used to – being a fan of swirly space stuff, trance grooves or old school Tangerine Dream. I associate the sweeter melodies (and shorter – none more than seven minutes) with New Age music that doesn’t often move me. Richard Bone clearly has a bit of a cult following in the States but I’d not come across him before. He manages this by canny marketing and creating work particular to himself. Each time I listened, I found it refused to play out quite like I expected and tunes kept popping up and styles kept changing. Each composition seemed to be an almost classical miniature, like something Satie would have knocked up. Different from track to track, some are washy watercolours but the ones that grabbed me have a sharper focus on the sugary tune and bubbling sequencers and complex rhythms. There is even a slow blues (Eight Sufis Swinging). The tropes of the genre appear – disembodied voice, programmed patterns, etc – but it feels like Bone is making music for himself rather than an audience and that made for a surprising listen. Ross McGibbon |