MINOTAUR SHOCK - Maritime

Looking at the cover art, one gets the sense of a landscape that's both familiar and unreal: a quayside resting on a sheet of emerald water, with three planets standing watch over a tiny, absorbed figure gazing off toward the horizon. It's a contemplative exercise that Bristol's Dave Edwards, aka Minotaur Shock, proves adept at navigating with a light touch, drifting through the delightful instrumental mini-suites that populate "Maritime".

Calm seabeds inhabited by indecipherable, colourful creatures that enliven underwater landscapes with harmonic movements, where everything adds up to a myriad of invisible details.

A "digital album", as the 4AD label's website drily puts it, having chosen to assign a number from its prestigious catalogue to this record — and we couldn't think of a more fitting description: Edwards carves out his soundscapes adorned with a gentle electronica, using it to express the childlike wonder of melodies as simple as they are profound.

The result of such care is an intricate, indietronica-tinged reworking of relatively disparate situations, split between past and present but united by the composure of a genuinely admirable aesthetic attitude.

Terry Riley's "In C" is none too subtly quoted in the overture of "Muesli", as if picking up the thread connecting new electronica to its minimalist origins — and it's no coincidence that the same theme resurfaces five tracks later, in "Twosley", as though a submerged repetition of notes were bobbing back to the surface for one more moment before sinking again; minimal echoes that in any case recur in the airy, danceable single "Vigo Bay", whose architecture looks toward the more accessible divertissements of another great master, Wim Mertens.

From the windy bay set sail the foolish fishermen — deep-sea ones, we'd wager, at least going by the title "Six Foolish Fishermen", paired with the pop-swing swagger of a composition fit for cheerfully cutting across open, sun-drenched seas.

But Minotaur Shock, as we said, operates within a very broad set of coordinates, and it's easy to catch him tinkering with the Eastern synth-pop school on "(She's In) Drydock Now", which sounds like an update of the standards set in the Eighties by the unforgettable Yellow Magic Orchestra, just as it's easy to find him reshaping on guitar the cosmic-pop atmospheres of Jean-Michel Jarre's "Les Chants Magnetiques" through a curiously Four Tet-like lens on "Mistaken Tourist".

Guitar that, in line with the finest examples of the new school, manages to craft the graceful little folktronica travel-gem "Somebody Once Told Me It Existed But They Never Found It", pushing innocence to its limits, much like the following "Luck Shield", in which one can even catch whiffs of Boards Of Canada, in phrasings that a few seasons ago were the preserve of the playful Pluxus and their "European Onion".

Precisely that crystalline innocence, because "Maritime" is an album that isn't ashamed of its own naivety, and just sits there smiling at us with the same wide-eyed expression of a child demanding attention.

And let's give it to him, because he's earned every bit of it.

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30/04/2026