GLOW
STATEMENT
Long past the equinox, autumn fades into the darkness of winter.
What can help the wandering soul?
Perhaps the classics of popular music.
We play Johnny Remember Me, Walking In The Rain, If You Were The Only Girl In The World for the comforts - of immortality, of remembrance, of connection, of true everlasting love.
But all is haunted.
Johnny Remember Me calls the lover’s ghost across the moors, ever restless. John Leyton sings six years before producer Joe Meek murders his landlady then kills himself.
While Veronica Bennett hopes for a lover who will walk in the rain with her and wish upon the stars, perhaps producer and writer Phil Spector is already planning to force his name on her, to lock her in a barbed-wired mansion, to confiscate her shoes, to install the glass topped gold coffin in the basement.
And, we can’t help it, If You Were The Only Girl In The World And I Were The Only Boy becomes a tale of two survivors desperately repopulating the earth through an eternal nuclear winter.
But in the dark heart of pop music we can also find the faint signatures of an ambient paradise.
In the improvisatory scat of Veronica’s voice resisting the fade-out Spector imposes, as the drums momentarily break through the wall of sound to boom-tit without apology, as the rain is heard angelic, the thunder embracing.
The rain, the mist, the wind, animated by love and memory and dedication and the simplicity of doing things together, as lovers, as comrades, as nomads wandering the moors or the city.
Ronald Binge unhinges the melodies and harmonies and lets the strings cascade - a speculative ambience of if-only-in-the-world. We follow him in layering and stretching the gaps, the noises, the incidental details.
Long past the equinox, we find ecstatic textures in the spaces left behind by melody, harmony, rhythm, and lyric. The syncopes that have passed us by a thousand times. Here our pop can run wild. And our dark ambiences can glow.
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