Plutonic Rainbows

I just got back from watching this. I did actually enjoy it. For me, there were a lot of universal themes shimmering beneath the surface. It felt like these are things the director, Francis Ford Coppola, is perhaps also occupied with. It is a truly beautiful movie to look at and has some trademark styles and cues that certainly make it feel like a Coppola movie. To be honest, I don’t understand why so many critics have dismissed it.

At times, the film is totally incoherent and yet mesmerising. I think perhaps that is the real allure of this movie.

I recently found this gem from way back in my collection. I remember playing it quite a bit in 1991. It hasn’t aged at all; if anything, it seems even more powerful than it did back then.

Reviewer Jason Ankey talks about it:

Virtually ignored upon its initial release, Laughing Stock continues to grow in stature and influence by leaps and bounds. Picking up where Spirit of Eden left off, the album operates outside the accepted sphere of rock to create music that is both delicate and intense. Recorded with a large classical ensemble, it defies easy categorization, conforming to very few structural precedents. While the gently hypnotic ‘Myrrhman’ flirts with ambient textures, the percussive ‘Ascension Day’ drifts toward jazz before the two sensibilities converge to create something entirely new and different on ‘New Grass.’ The epic ‘After the Flood,’ on the other hand, is an atmospheric whirlpool laced with jackhammer guitar feedback and Mark Hollis’ remarkably plaintive vocals. It flows into ‘Taphead,’ perhaps the most evocative, spacious, and understated piece on the record. A work of staggering complexity and immense beauty, Laughing Stock remains an under-recognized masterpiece, and its echoes can be heard throughout much of the finest experimental music issued in its wake.

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Euro troubadour Milan Warmoeskerken charms our darned socks off with an instant classic entry to the pantheon of timeless Stroom beauties - daydreamy, hydroponic pastoralism to soundtrack urbane yearnings RIYL CS + Kreme, Dirty Beaches, Mittland Och Leo, Eyeless In Gaza, Cocteau Twins, Les Disques Du Crépuscule, Enno Velthuys, Felt, or the most crushed Joanne Robertson & Dean Blunt jams.

‘Leave Another Day’ is arguably the magnum opus of Milan W., whose breadcrumb trail of work as Crumar Young, and as part of Mittland Och Leo, Speedqueen, Beach, and others, has lured listeners deep into the s/Lowlands backwoods imagination over the past 16 years. The album’s dozen songs illuminate the thoughts of an old head on young shoulders; gilding and binding aspects of dusky country, folk-rock, blues, chamber-like jazz noir, spangled kosmiche and indie-pop, with flushes of synthetic warmth and a strikingly poised voice for the ages, perfectly suspended in-the-mix, floating moody above it all.

The Antwerp artist’s music could hardly be a more apt for release on Belgium’s Stroom, carrying with it a certain modest, lowkey vitality and slowness of thought we’ve come to associate with that strange, gently undulating sliver of Europe where things occur at their own time-out-of-joint (or as one put it to us, akin to an “absurd England”). It’s maybe a tenuous link, but the expressive instrumental synthy sentiment of ‘Blue Heron’ shares a title and evocative European soundscape feeling with Enno Velthuys’ early ‘80s peach, and can be heard as symptomatic of a smoky magique and almost medieval meets modernist appeal that riddles the whole album.

We could almost be hearing a more full voiced CS + Kreme (from that other eerie England, Oz) cooing from the floating chamber music of ‘I Wait’, whilst ‘All The Way’ evokes the Midlands lilt and jangle of Felt or less histrionic Eyeless in Gaza, and ‘Face To Face’ weaves in the soft female counterpoint of Martha Maieu, who lends nuanced, harmonised filament to swaying Lynchian centrepiece ‘Ballad’ and the simply gorgeous ‘Memories’. Milan’s contemporary colours are worn more explicitly in the skull-rub synth detunings and city pop detour coda of ‘Wanda’, which makes the stylistic balance of crepuscular airs from anachronstic eras feel all that more intoxicating, when contrasted with the contemporary x classical touches of chef’s kiss synth and strum that come together in his parting piece.

You can get the album now by heading over to Boomkat.