Memotone's Will Yates, one of the most productive, adaptable and collaborative figures currently active in British music, returns to Accidental Meetings for a latest long player that seems to suggest that regardless of where he may roam, his connection to Bristol remains as resolute as ever. Yates' music has long been characterised by an omnivorous and venturing impulse, absorbing the influence of various worlds (fourth and otherwise) beyond his own, and has rarely settled on one specific sound or idea, yet there remains something distinctly Bristolian in spirit at its heart. His is not so much one version of the city - be that the afterhours soundsystem mutations of trip hop, the misty experimentalism of Planet Records, or the post-dubstep sound universe of the Young Echo collective - as an extension of its creative spirit into his own refined idiom. Warm Shadows closely follows 2025's smallest things (via yours truly) and the run of three albums released in 2024, and feels born of a similar songwriting process that explores sound and texture over conventional song format. In essence, this guy can get a sound out of anything, and convincingly so too, and it's that kind of skilled ear that encourages a kind of supple genre agnosticism, songs that weave implacably between jazz, drone, ambient, minimal electronics, dreampop and modern composition. Features from Typesun, Jabu's guest, and Ugne Uma (x2) offer alternative pathways in, though I think there's a reason that Yates is so often mentioned in reference to Jon Hassell - like with the late, great composer, Yates generates imaginary soundworlds built from accumulated knowledge and untethered instincts, dreamy, ghostly, and uncommonly utopian. Think of Warm Shadows - of memotone in general - not so much as Fourth World but as a possible musics built from the stratified, sedimentary history of Bristol sound culture.
FFO: Jon Hassell, Jabu, Ugne Uma, Tomaga, Pierre Bastien
