The fact that PAL have released the ambient and electronic Leisure Forever on a Sunday is telling. This is an album of tracks that meld easily with a day spent floating between the excesses of your Saturday night and the need for coffee and relaxation on the morning after the night before.
The band are visual artist Cherelle Sappleton and sound engineer Tom Morris and the album mixes improvisation with composition as they mix synthesisers with live percussion, voice and guitars unrecognisable under the cloak of effects, and the band say “Throughout Leisure Forever, musical and non-musical sounds are processed, edited and resampled, an emphasis on bass frequencies, delay and rhythm that references both club-based and experimental forms of electronic music, despite an absence of traditional rhythmic elements.”
These tracks are engaging and beautiful, intriguing and beguiling. There is something about music without the grit of a time signature that stretches everything out, resonating with your brain’s electrical impulses to create a very Zen outcome. You can put Leisure Forever on and listen intently, let your mind drift, or do other things at the same time, and each will be rewarding.
It’s unsurprising that a visual artist would make music that can evoke such rich landscapes in the mind and coupled with a sound engineer’s knowledge of placement, design, mix and outcome, it’s a match made in ambient heaven, in the same postcode as Brian Eno or William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops.
It was hard to single out specific tracks to include in this review as this album flows so wonderfully so I would advise starting at the beginning and letting your mind drift on its soporific eddies and currents.
The album is available as a digital download and a limited-edition cassette from their Bandcamp page.
The lush caramel swirl of the album’s artwork is by Nadine Tropschuh. See more of her work on her website.
PAL socials: Instagram
Review by Paul F Cook
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