cheval sombre

Looks absolutely scrumptious, a visual trip if ever there was one, a strictly ultra limited 12 inch from those purveyors of ethereal psych – Sonic Cathedral. ‘madder love’ EP arrives pressed on translucent berry coloured wax all housed in a transparent paper sleeve featuring Sharon Lock’s original ‘mad love’ artwork re-tweaked by Marc Jones. Upon the finite waxen grooves three specially commissioned remixes of Cheval Sombre’s ‘couldn’t do’ by Justin Robertson, Time and Space Machine and the Horrors’ Tim Furse all rounded off with a recalibration of ‘someplace else’ reworked as ‘someplace slow’ by CS himself. If the images are exquisite they then are aptly married by the sounds which are divine. First up Justin Robertson’s floaty mind morphing deadstock 33’s edit slinkily slipstreams into what can only be described as kaleidoscopically hued Australasian techno drone-scape hazily dipped in mystical Celtic folk flashings for what is a gloriously tripping head phonic spectacle which at various points somehow manages to touch base and join the dots between a blissed out Paris Angels and a lost in the moment Sunray. When confronted with the same track Time and Space Machine go all sitar swirly and woozy cutting dissolving psychedelic shapes across dust traced Arabesque backdrops before going off on a hypnosis inducing  cosmic sea trip , quite sultry if you ask me and dare I say very Sonic Boom. In truth the most adventurous of the trio comes courtesy of Tom Furse whose ‘extrapolation’ remould shimmers in as though it’s emerged from the dark side of Jean Michel Jarre’s psyche before setting the controls to journey deep into the void aboard a hulking leviathan star cruiser piloted by a seriously zoned out Craig Padilla reading off Tangerine Dream star charts. Cheval Sombre wraps up the set in a typically sedate and bliss kissed fashion with the intimate and frailly re-trimmed aural apparition ‘someplace slow’ nee ‘someplace else’ – so fragile that aside making Galaxie 500 sound like speed freaking metal heads has you fearful it’ll shatter and splinter into tiny pieces just for being in the same room as it.