Spool - s/t

Something has really got up the nose of 2025. Only two weeks ago Jenny Hval delivered an excellent LP inspired by her love of perfume and named for her favourite scent, and now we've this debut record from Spool, a collaboration between Florian TM Zeisig and perfumer Angel Paradise that 'holds the frequencies of both past and future—present and remembered' in the way a sense memory might. On closer examination, it's a seemingly logical development. Ambient sound and scent do feel conceptually tied, impressionistic, sometimes intangible signifiers of something else, abstract or concrete. There's potential to go very wrong with this kind of 'tasteful, slightly bouregoius thinking (one might be now be reminded of the farcical scene with the perfumer in Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams), though it's not an issue Zeisig and Paradise face. Perhaps I'm following my own sense memory here, but the samples and loops drawn upon across these nine tracks seem deeply redolent of the Blue Nile, smoky, vapourous emanations heavy with the kind of midnight-blue regret and longing that filled in the space around Paul Buchannan's songs. Comparing a 2025 ambient record with the sophisti-pop of Hats is a little off-piste I'll admit, though not without some precedent - think of those Dean Hurley/Romance LPs built around pop song samples, or even The Caretaker's re-appropriation of old ballroom 78s as a comment on failing memory. No source is out of bounds, and Spool is great at serving its stated intention of suggestion and impression. More still, if my read isn't an accurate reflection of where these sounds came, it is at least what I hear. And isn't that the point? Follow your ears, as you might your nose...
 
FFO: Blue Nile, Romance, Dean Hurley, The Caretaker, William Basinski