Uman - Chaleur Humaine

More impressive archival work from Freedom To Spend with this first-time reissue of Uman's Chaleur Humaine, a preeminent collection of hyperreal dreampop that skirts the fringes of 4AD ethereality and new age experimentalism. Recorded in their own studio in the suburbs of Paris in the early 90s, the brother-sister duo of Danielle and Didier Jean display equally an obvious pop sensibility - this is very glossy, glassy sounding music - and an experimental instinct. The result is uncanny in that classic hypnagogic way, a dreamstate waltz that marries technological utopianism with a kind of new age inflected chanson, Danielle's vocal processed in such a way as to become almost machine-like, a songbird Hal or Alexa. As such, what's most striking about Chaleur Humaine is the merging of the synthetic and the human, a rainbow in the oily water of the information age. It's a sound often associated with Stroom, and by extension, that hinterland moment in European music between synthpop, dance culture and the avant garde where forms had yet to form. So yes, more of that slippery and still somehow uncategorizable purgatory pop.