simon james

About our person somewhere, annoying that we haven’t got around to mentioning it yet, we’ve a Simon James cassette entitled ‘Shenzhen / Shanghai’ through musicity which released in December in limited number, has had the unnerving habit of impishly finding its way onto our player with alarming frequency. A heads up is surely long over due. I was reminded of this because Spun Out of Control have just announced a brace of limited cassette releases, one of which is, yep you guessed it, by Simon James (arriving in a choice of cartridge colours – Scrubs Green or Anaesthetic White whatever that is). Entitled ‘Cosmic Surgery’ it features eleven newly penned eeries influenced by the photographic / origami / book project by Alma Haser, Emily Macaulay and Piers Bizony, something to do with futuristic implants that morph your features to reflect your persona / mood or even desired look, now wouldn’t that be a bugger if an errant glitch sneaked in and turned us all into Boris or Donald lookalikes. I’m creeped out already. Anyhow, while we wait for Mr Postman to skip down the avenue to deliver our cassette, we’ve honed in on the sets longest track, incidentally the opener which goes by the name ‘the waiting room / going under’. Not sure about you, but there are moments on this when I appear to be having déjà vu flashbacks to Japan’s ‘Tin Drum’ perhaps it’s the icy calm silently lifting from the clinical and sterilised precision of these orderly opines, minimalist murmurs ghosted in transparent tunings dinked in floaty mosaics of stateless dreamy serene. https://spunoutofcontrol.bandcamp.com/