Cassette
In a year of scene-setting/moment-capturing compilations (see Five Years of Failure, the imminently forthcoming Going Back to Sleep, Tough Love's Don't Do Anything Important...), newly-founded imprint Slipping might just have made a case for the most wide-reaching of the lot. For a collection named Ardeer Peninsula, it's funny how geography is the one thing that does not link these 15 artists, transmitting as they do from all over the map. The peninsula in this instance is real (an abandoned area in Scotland once home to its largest explosives factory), but it's also the icon for a shared imagined ground. There are connecting aesthetic through-lines and preferences, but the mutuality is mostly one of sensibility. Many of the tracks featured here are the work of a single individual (WOE regulars will recognise many of the names), and the music sounds suitably private and intimate as a result, often of low-fidelity, mostly built around the guitar, and frequently struck with a melancholic gloom that suggests much time spent indoors with curtains closed to the world in pursuit of a different internal universe. Funny again, then, that such isolated pursuits can now be found amongst so many kindred spirits. The permanently online life means we're perpetually connected and atomised at the same time - alone together, if you will (even when you don't want). See it as a salve, a victory or just an unexpected pleasure, for an endeavour like Ardeer Peninsula functions as a familial arm around an increasingly disparate world that fittingly sounds warm, homely and comforting where so many other things now are generally not. It's a way to be reconciled.
FFO: People Skills, Memotone, Juho Toivonen, Jim Strong, Amateur Hour
