Welcome to the Mood
by Leisure
In the absence of prominent media coverage and identifiable faces, Leisure have quietly become one of our most successful musical exports for their understated, smooth and soulful pop, which sails close to subdued yacht rock.
Here, on the fifth album since they formed a decade ago, this semi-supergroup (members from Goodnight Nurse, Kids of 88, Kidz in Space and others) offer a MOR sheen with hints of disco and 1970s LA pop (Diamonds, which slips seamlessly into the low-light Missing You) and cloudy pop (Desert Moon Sky).
There are elements of soul shuffle (One in a Million), a kind of blunted Steely Dan-meets-Christopher Cross vibe, and the whole album politely lowers the pulse rate. Summer is coming and Leisure offer something polished, professional and undemanding.
Traces
by Rhian Sheehan & Arli Liberman
The idea of music for imaginary films emerged with such experimental groups as Tangerine Dream and albums like Alpha Centauri (1971) and Phaedra (1974). They evoked images and the atmosphere of being in space during an age when films (1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) and the Apollo programme put the public into the capsule.
Brian Eno’s 1978 Music for Films is the landmark in the genre, although nearly half its 19 short instrumentals had already appeared in movies.
Inspired by Vangelis’s haunting music for 1982’s Blade Runner and atmospheric post-rock, local composers Rhian Sheehan and Arli Liberman – who individually have numerous soundtrack credits – here present cinematic sound designs of almost oppressive density through a battery of electronics, Moog and Rhodes keyboards.
When it beams down onto a featureless planet (the heroic rush of Specular where the inhabitants don’t seem especially friendly), suspends you in a sleep capsule (Immaru) or casts you adrift in the cosmos (the eight-minute Drift), the music makes that internal movie very real.
Turn off your mind. This is atmospheric music for a place where there’s no atmosphere, and no one can hear you scream.
Encircle
By Alan Brown
Auckland keyboard player and sonic explorer Brown played jazz with Blue Train, Nathan Haines and the Grand Central Band, but in the past decade has blended electronic sounds with piano improvisations (and an electric instrument called the ondes Martenot, developed in France in the 1920s).
The result has been albums of melodic, often weightless, ambient music. His Composure (2018) and Murmur (2021) are appealing aural downtime.
This album comes with a somewhat forbidding note that it “partly emerged through an exploratory process of improvisation centred on the interplay of contrasting sounds and textures inspired by generative audio systems”.
Set aside the method and sink into the mood: comforting atmospherics and sounds that glide past elegantly. Only occasional ghosts in the machinery.
If the Sheehan/Liberman album is disturbing and disruptive, here’s the tranquil, calming counterpoint.
Available digitally and on CD, with Leisure and Sheehan/Liberman also on vinyl.
