ALBUM REVIEW: Modern Studies & Tommy Perman – Emergent Slow Arcs

Fire Records

Released: 26.07.19

When artist/designer/musician Tommy Perman listened to the second album from the wondrous, lustrous folk pop of fellow Scots Modern Studies, he searched for something truly primal in its message. He deconstructed the strings, brass and keyboards and subsumed the male/female vocals to totally refashion the sound into the most abstract electronica.

Where the original Swell To Great is a serenading celebration of the magical melancholia of landscape, the reimagined Emergent Slow Arcs is a twinned Aphex of computerised soundscapes; music but not as we once knew it. An ephemeral mist that masks, circles and part clears to almost reveal the signature of sonic faraway hills. These born-again songs possess an enchanting, beguiling otherness.