Cassette
Costa del Birmingham! Conatala and All Night Flight have paired for a faithful reproduction of this Janet Sherbourne and Mark Lockett collaboration, a kind of DIY jazzy exotica first released by Practical Music in 1987 and one of several released the Midlands-based pair worked on together throughout the eighties. Both Sherbourne and Lockett would prove themselves to be adaptable, shape-shifting artists, experimenting with jazz, modern composition (and film score work), gamelan, and on Walks Abroad, a latin-inflected, new pop sophistication underscored with a few piano jazz digressions. It's a schizophrenic collection, a diaristic fusion (that's without a doubt the word) of The Weekend, ECM and a couple of five quid bottles of Pinot Grigio. This is not the Midlands i remember. There's a Henley in Birmingham. It does not have a regatta. If history had sailed a different way, this might have been its soundtrack. Wonky, charming, rich in influence and imagination, and operating solely at its own whims. Very much impractical music, as it goes, i'd suggest.
