Goldfrapp

The crucible of trip-hop was born as an urban phenomenon, a concrete jungle in the rain, a blurred black-and-white snapshot of British suburbia. Sure, there's that cinematic attitude, brought above all by Portishead, projecting it towards far-off worlds, between old spy-story 60s vibes and noir unease of Lynchian memory. But no one had ever imagined the Bristol sound in a rural version, set in some mythical woodland dimension, amid green conifer forests and endless icy expanses. Trapped in a waking dream within an ancestral, unforgiving nature. At least until the arrival of the intrepid Alison Elizabeth Margaret Goldfrapp, who would update it according to her own highly personal vision just as, at the dawn of the 2000s, the movement had already spent its momentum.

The blonde singer, composer and keyboardist took her first steps precisely within the "Wild Bunch" of the Bristol alchemists, that melting pot of rappers, DJs, dancers, graffiti writers and producers who would gather to play in basements across the English city's suburbs. In short, that formidable workshop which had already produced the likes of Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky. And it was alongside the latter that Alison's career began, an eclectic artist who, during her studies at the art department of Middlesex University, had already staged performances and installations combining sound and image. While still in college, she contributed to Tricky's debut album, "Maxinquaye", and joined him on tour. During the same period, she also took part in the making of "Snivilisation" by Orbital. Meanwhile, she began writing her own songs, until one of her demo tapes reached the ears of Will Gregory, a composer of film soundtracks, who was captivated by her vocal and songwriting talent. Thus began the partnership between the two, which would go down in history as Goldfrapp.

The enchanted mountain

Goldfrapp's early projects were singular experiments, inspired by classical music, 1960s film scores and French pop. Delicate themes which, reshaped with electronic drones, turned into tense, crepuscular ballads. Mute was the label that believed in them. And the duo's debut record would amply repay that trust. For the occasion, two studio aces joined Alison's court: Adrian Utley of Portishead and John Parish, PJ Harvey's trusted producer. Together, they built the perfect sonic frame for the ethereal intuitions of the chanteuse from Enfield, Middlesex.

Goldfrapp's alchemy stems from a blend of disparate elements: take Portishead-style hushed, spectral arrangements, season them with the ethereal, dreamlike taste of Cocteau Twins and the more sensual side of Bjork, immerse it all in Morricone-esque soundscapes and jazzy atmospheres straight out of 1960s film scores, and you'll get — roughly — the sonic essence of "Felt Mountain", the English band's memorable debut. Almost a "mental film", deeply connected to the environment that spawned it. "We recorded it in an isolated bungalow in Wiltshire, in the middle of nowhere," Alison would reveal, "It was all very eerie, the night was full of strange animal noises from the woods." A scenario also reflected on the cover, with its stunning images of a German forest.

"Felt Mountain" lacks nothing, not even an icebreaker single, which bursts in like a bolt from the blue at the dawn of the new millennium. "Lovely Head" — also made famous by a successful BMW ad — is first and foremost a showcase of Alison Goldfrapp's talent: her ravishing, siren-like soprano, torn and anguished, soars in a whirl of electronic keyboards and sampled western whistles, dazzling with its disorienting mix of power, tenderness and sensuality. But the English singer doesn't limit herself to the whispered sensuality typical of trip-hop: she expands its narrative potential, becoming a fairy, a witch, even an alien creature, as her voice, electronically distorted and altered, turns into pure vibration, suspended over that Morricone-esque whistle that seems to come from some remote canyon in "Once Upon a Time in the West". Right up to the unsettling closing line, "Frankenstein will would your mind". It's precisely in this contrast between futurist electronics and nostalgic echoes of the past that the whole allure of "Felt Mountain" plays out.

"Paper Bag" continues along this line, with a sophisticated harpsichord-and-strings accompaniment that again recalls those 1960s soundtracks so beloved as a fetish object throughout trip-hop, while the lyrics — with lines like "No time to fuck/ But you like the rush/ And where would we/ Be without sums/ Deals we make" — reveal a subtle irony, in service of a song tormented by both love troubles and business dealings. The shadow of the elfin Bjork of "Debut" instead looms among the walls of beats in "Human", introducing more pronounced rhythmic elements, with a groove recalling the cha-cha-cha, but filtered through an electronic lens, while Alison's singing takes on deeper tones, almost like a seasoned jazz-cabaret diva, as in the velvety sinuousness of the lunar "Pilots", with her voice floating over a harmonic progression with a cinematic sweep. In "Deer Stop", on the other hand, her voice is manipulated until it sounds childlike, but within an unsettling, almost Freudian psychological dimension, releasing a melody that is both enchanted and mournful, as if in a kind of hallucinatory trance. And in an even more dreamlike dimension takes shape the spectral waltz of "Oompa Radar" (inspired by Roman Polanski's film "Cul-de-sac"), with brass dictating a martial pace over a minimal bed of analogue synthesizers, and Alison's dreamy voice used here mainly as an atmospheric instrument, as happens, even more markedly, on the near-instrumental title track, whose whispered, chant-like refrain pairs with a glacial backing of clangs, whistles, handclapping and a metronome-like beat.

Fascist baby and sirens of the woods

This is futuristic chamber music, where reverbs chase each other like shadows across immense valleys and snow-capped mountains. Music of emotional isolation, reflecting a desire to escape the spatio-temporal coordinates of reality and surrender to a remote, secluded elsewhere. But the forest of "Felt Mountain" is not a bucolic place: it's a non-place, a threshold separating us from a deeper, unfathomable dimension. Every sound is muffled, rarefied, as if filtered through a thick layer of moss. "Every note carries with it the pungent smell of the undergrowth, its dark humus soil, the glossy needles of the conifers and their resinous bark; as if the estranged music, woven from perverse dreams, were intertwined with the sounds of a mysterious, unsettling mountain forest, where a thousand creatures stir night and day," as Valeria Rusconi so aptly put it.

The final knockout blow to the listener comes with "Utopia", another breathtaking melodic opener declaimed by Alison's soft soprano over a shimmering magma of electronic pulses, reverbs and dissonance. "Fascist baby/ Utopia, utopia/ My dog needs new ears/ Make his eyes see forever/ Make him live like me." Sinister lines that, far from utopia, reveal a dystopian future made of genetic manipulation and cloning labs. Alison's voice grows even more hypnotic, while the epic scope of the arrangement - strings, synths, synthesized vocals - amplifies the sense of estrangement and toxic sweetness.

"Horse Tears" closes the album: pure gibbonsian anguish, with the Portishead muse conjured up in an abyss of desolate melancholy, skillfully staged through delicate string outlines and a voice that grows ever more diaphanous and intangible, until it vanishes, swallowed up in the mix.

Nine songs for a total of just over 39 minutes of music capable of leaving a permanent mark. "Felt Mountain" was met with enthusiasm by critics, earning a Mercury Prize nomination in 2001 and going gold in the UK. But above all, it will endure over time, despite its deep ties to the sound of its era. Its secret perhaps lies precisely in its retro-futurism, evident too in its blend of classical and modern instruments, drum machines, synthetic loops and glitches that sound like nocturnal animal calls, alongside dramatic mellotron, violins and tribal percussion. Its stories are timeless too, populated with visions of a desolate, unsettling future: mad love affairs, terrifying societies inhabited by sinister androids disguised as humans, despair and redemption. A scenario of irresistible appeal, though it wouldn't have been the same without the decisive contribution of a performer like Alison Goldfrapp, capable of forever bewitching the listener with her arsenal of estranging vocalizations, alien hisses and mesmerizing whispers worthy of a forest siren. One of those spells you'll never fully recover from.

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11/05/2025