The Fading Room - Memories & Remixes

Future Loop Foundation

Just Music

2008-04-28

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Future Loop Foundation a.k.a Mark Barrott has been creating music of diverse influences for some time - releasing music since 1996, taking inspiration over the years from early Detroit techno and drum and bass in his earlier releases, before progressing on to producing downbeat and chill out after moving to Berlin some years later. I’ll admit to not being familiar with his work before this (possibly an age thing), but listening to this latest release it’s clear that this immanently personal and emotional collection of tracks comes from an artist consolidating his various musical and life influences and creating an album imbued with nostalgia and dreamy childhood memories.

Apparently a bit of a technology nut (recently one of the artists chosen to promote Yamaha’s Tenori-on), Barrott’s music has the obvious advantage of having been producing music long enough to know his analogue inside out and making the latest digital technologies work for him too. A fondness for the past, musically and in a wider sense is clear in The Fading Room, which has its origins in old recordings of family interviews in the 70s rediscovered a few years ago. Tape loops and musique concrete are weaved into songs with plush orchestral arrangements, acoustic and electronic melodies fused into rich brassy textures, a musical equivalent of an overly saturated Super 8 family video from the 70s.

The Fading Room blends sweet swells of synthesised sounds with acoustic percussion and atmospheric field recordings such as in “Sunshine Philosophy”, with snippets of grandma’s voice layered over loops of violin melodies, rewound loops of keyboard accompaniment and understated percussion. The distinctly old fashioned aesthetic seems to stay loyal to the old school methods of tape looping, making good use of that good old backward-loops-chestnut throughout the album. “Experimentation Begins At Home” creates a montage of vocal recordings over simple bouncy looped synths reminiscent of an old fashioned wind-up toys. Where tracks like this one and “Homegrown Dynamic” leave you drifting off into autumnal reverie, developing sweeping motifs between the tracks with the aid of mellowing piano or violin parts, “Everything As It Should Be” is reduced down to a simple acoustic guitar part, with an evokative piano and string accompaniment and feels distinctly filmic as recordings of grandad talking about the war run over it.

A musical equivalent of an overly saturated Super 8 family video from the 70s.

Taking the previous work of Future Loop Foundation into account, the downtempo and ambient offerings of the album suggest a bit of a post-rave comedown. The second CD seeks to bring it back to the dancefloor (a little) and offers remixes by artists such as Tunng, The Beauty Room, The Go! Team and Rob Da Bank and Chris Coco. Most of the remixes expand the same nostalgic wistfulness of the original songs, such as Tunng’s “On The Village Radar” and The Go! Team’s remix of “This Is Where We Live”, whereas Rob Da Bank and Chris Coco’s reworking has a more prominent pulse, forecasting a heady British festival summer, fitting right in to the acoustic downtempo Big Chill festival which crops up with associations of Future Loop Foundation. The Hiem Toyko remix stands out as the most obviously link to trendier electronic music of recent years and probably a Berlin connection too, slicing and dicing a microhouse beat and minimal techno motifs under arpeggiated synths to give the original of “Garden Communities” a complete overhaul.

All in all, respect to Barrott for keeping it old school, constraining himself to the simplest analogue methods in a time when so much advanced sequencing software is plentiful. His materialization of childhood memories into bittersweet songs, blending acoustic and electronic instruments is well done and he undeniably creates some beautiful and personal moments in The Fading Room. For me it’s not a record to get excited about, being demographically unable to get too nostalgic about family life in the north of England in the 1970s and probably not being in the right age bracket/generation to appreciate chillout just yet, but to do as chillout does, it does it very nicely. Bang it on at a vegetarian barbecue this summer and it’ll be a winner.