NATHAN FAKE - Drowning In A Sea Of Love

If you already knew Nathan Fake, it was for his slim but already formidable body of house productions, which some, stretching the point a bit, had filed under the English trance movement, of which this twenty-two-year-old from Norfolk had supposedly been declared the saviour.

If you'd always ignored everything about him, the remix with which James Holden (owner of Border Community, who release his music) shook up and doped his "The Sky Was Pink" will still have reached your ears. And while the original went practically unheard, the remix became an absolute smash, turning into Phonica's all-time best-selling release: if you spin records and have ever passed through London, you know what I'm talking about.

But the lad also gave us other wonderfully body and soul singles, such as "Outhouse" and "Dinamo", two cornerstones for every dancing body across the Old Continent. In short, anyone who set out to discover this album without having read anything beforehand surely approached it expecting a house record.

And that's where the trap springs: there's no house here at all. Indietronica, if anything. But that's only a starting point, an insufficient label, a definition that alone won't suffice.

Let's try to broaden things out, then. We could talk about a psychedelic indietronica, layering watercolour washes of effected notes over relatively simple, direct, immediate rhythms. A handful of quick-hit girl/boy songs. And for that matter, the man himself has never hidden his idolatry for Aphex Twin, who, even if he didn't shape his sound directly, profoundly helped him uncover the mystery of that attitude which is neither purely for listening nor purely for dancing - a secret realm whose keys few possess. To varying degrees, the other influences he's named in interviews can be heard in his compositions: the most cosmic kraut-rock (Cluster above all), Four Tet, Mogwai, Orbital, Boards Of Canada. This really is a new generation now reaching our readers.

Fake immediately shows off his best weapons on "Stops": synthetic "vents" in the style of Kieran Hebden (recalling those of the "The Sky Was Pink" remix), sweet melodies, a particular taste for evocative atmospheres. And layers, layers, layers. The following "Grandfathered" also shows what young Nathan is capable of, with his extraordinary ability to keep melodies standing upright over the most treacherous terrain of errors, program changes, skids, and time signatures grabbed back by the scruff of the neck. His are worlds in constant torsion, electronic (though also more reconciled) versions of those of My Bloody Valentine (just to throw out another heavyweight comparison).

Worlds, as we were saying… “Drowning In A Sea Of Love” paints quite a few of them. There's an otherworldly one like that of “Charlie's House”, which climbs a synth arpeggio up to celestial sounds, to a land we can only visit in our sleep. There's the comforting cradle of “You Are Here”, a quiet explosion of joy. There are sketches of ambient ufology like “Bumblechord”, “Falmer” and “Bawsey”. There's “Long Sunny”, the discreet charm of the loop (kept in the background). There's room too for the restlessness of “Superpositions”, which shows off a DJ Shadow-like mastery in joining fast, anxious cadences to sounds that are almost atmospheric and caressing, sounds that crave the time the relentlessly sustained rhythmic pattern denies them.

But above all, there's that one track. The masterpiece. It's “The Sky Was Pink”, his own personal “Interstellar Overdrive”. A journey from your own headphones all the way to Venus and back. The dawn sky, the wonder, a mind not yet ready to stop. That strange mix of melancholy and hope you can only feel at the sun's first peek over the horizon, when the previous day's disappointments blend with an incurable faith in what's to come.

Don't let this one slip by, then. This album holds what bands like Boards Of Canada and Sigur Rós once gave you: a one-way ticket to Elsewhere.

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08/05/2006