Simian Mobile Disco - Murmurations

May 11, 2018 - Wichita Recordings

I. The Review

This blog so far has mostly focused on music electronically crafted for the modern dance floor—synthesized instruments; vocal samples cut up, wrung out, and pasted back together again, often rendered unrecognizable; strange sound effects; weird mechanical clicking. We talk about songs that are cerebral, hard edge, and unfathomable to the ears of prior centuries. With Murmurations, Simian Mobile Disco takes a different approach, stepping back to arguably the most fundamental musical element: the human chorus. But it’s not a chorus of distorted, synthesized voices; no tongue-in-cheek, digital automata. The driving force on the album consists of real, recorded humans singing in harmony with each other as a body of sound.

Simian Mobile Disco is a pillar and household name in the house scene. It consists of James Ford and Jas Shaw, two members of the British band Simian. The project has resulted in a widely varied discography showcasing musical expedition and discovery. No two albums are alike. James and Jas are true artists in the romantic way. They fearlessly explore the limits of electronic production together simply for music’s sake, and we as listeners are privileged to learn with them. 

Murmurations is a manifestation of Simian Mobile Disco rediscovering the power of the human voice by collaborating with the London-based Deep Throat Choir. Traditional human expression is married to contemporary composition and production, creating a third realm that is sublime and completely unexpected. In this soundscape, we have electronic musicians playing with fire and creating the divine. The results are stunning.

The human chorus is the original instrument. It’s the tie that binds us to the myths and legends of ancient humanity, the mystery of existence. The songs on this album are bursting with the energy of storytelling around fires, of dancing to raw, manmade rhythm in the endless night, of performance, of the forest, of sharing fundamental truths and passing our true selves down through the generations. To listen is to remember the saga of life.  

The first track ‘Boids’ sets the scene with a round that evokes the build of a summer afternoon rainstorm. As we move through through the album, a heavy, tribal percussive influence is coupled with the expansive power of the voices, pulsing between perfect harmony and a state of being at odds with each other. The auditory textures are sweltering and as alive as I am, a superhuman soup of sound that imitates and thus celebrates being of nature. It’s like listening to whale songs and loon calls. This natural force is heightened in ‘A Perfect Swarm’ which really shows off the range of the Deep Throat Choir. As the voices explore space without words, inventing new energies and wailing into the night like whales on the hunt, they are backed up by techno beats, robotic underthings, and slightly glitchy effects. 

The lyrics on this album are poetic and introspective, singing the emotions of the stories as the Greek choruses of ancient theater. But the music is so powerful that it is difficult to pay attention to the poetry itself. I find the function of the words as musical notes and expressive sound objects more captivating than the meaning they convey. The brain struggles to employ reason and emotion at the same time, and the tracks on Murmurations are so emotionally charged that feeling the music dominates reading the lyrics. 

The presence of lyrics is necessary though. Not only do the words provide compelling musical timbres, they also provide a point of entry into the work. In the modern world where we isolate ourselves from each other and our primal states, we find it hard to stare boldly at art that can’t be understood by logic alone. Many are not up to the challenge unless tricked into it. By using lyrics to turn our own defenses against us, Simian Mobile Disco and the Deep Throat Choir trick us into it. 

Murmurations is released on Wichita Recordings. Give in to the mystery. 

II. The Anecdote

When I was a child, for ten years I attended camp every summer in the hot, muggy forested hills of middle Tennessee. It was a sacred space for us adolescents to grow up and learn together, something that belonged to us exclusively, where we communed and carved out a community for ourselves to ease growing pains and escape into a realm of unconditional love, something extremely rare in the transition from childhood to adulthood. 

One summer, we met in the middle of the night in a wooden gymnasium by the lakeside. The counselors had laid out bowls, spoons and pans in various shades of cheap plastic and aluminum all over the floor for us. Sleepy, dreamy, we sat down on the hot floor in disheveled rows and picked up our dinnerware, our instruments. And the camp director, with her dimples and golden curly hair, smiled her way onto the floor in front of us and said, “Isn’t it good to be alive? To be a part of creation?” And then she laughed, and her laugh morphed into a scream to the night, and she beat a massive stock pot with a metal serving spoon and stomped her feet. When I think back to the moment we joined her in existential ecstasy, it is an endless instant in time, a duality that is as much a part of me as it is unfathomable to me. We danced together and beat our dinnerware in that sweaty gym and screamed into the night until our vocal cords were spent and we were out of breath. We were a pure force of nature, actively turning the planet on its axis. 

That moment remains a temporal anomaly, an everlasting memory of the day I shook the earth with my existence as a member of community, and that experience of the sublime keeps me alive and moving forward year after year. ☔