CHAPTER 2

 #99: PLAID

"Dancers"

from the album Polymer

Released: June 2019

 

 

 

One summer following a prolonged stay in hospital which made me question whether I could even ever walk again, let alone dance, I randomly came across the music on late-night radio. From the new album by Plaid, the DJ told me. That nice, constant, politely-blinking star in the far north-eastern corner of the musical firmament, mainly because their music reminds me, as does so much other music on the same label, of the East Neuk of Fife, the lengthening shadows on the boardwalk parallel to the golf course, the icy immensity of the North Sea, the feeling that being in St Andrews has placed you not quite in "the world."

You could listen to a lot of music from the last four or so decades which would remind you of St Andrews in the early eighties. Forget the pain, hunger, ideations and untethered displeasure. Your mind chooses to recall the highlights only. The shade of green that the sun makes the grass at certain times when afternoon is gracefully blending into evening - "Taking Islands In Africa" by Japan, the last verse of "Love Is A Stranger" by Eurythmics, even the instrumental break to "Ooh To Be Ah" by KajaGooGoo (those slightly delayed keyboards, dragging half a beat behind the rhythm, creating a strawberry globe of otherness) would all make a new sense in this unwordly world.

Or you might think of lullabies, soothing pictorial boxes of celestes and rhythms so lightly accented they could bear wings, the music which has stayed with you the longest and deepest, because everything we experience, do or endure in our lives is reliant on the abstractly scattered signifiers you registered when you were perhaps too young to understand much of anything beyond elemental appeal, or appealing to the elements.

So much of what has come out on the Warp record label has appealed to that hardwired first childishness, perhaps more so than the closely-engineered synaptic plays of Ghostbox (watch how the perceived nostalgia cell jumps into, but does not leapfrog, the one permitting awareness). Listening to Boards of Canada or Aphex Twin or even Plone will set you back to an element of character that you've spent your whole adult life attempting to deny. "Aquarius" by Boards of Canada will have you staring at the Pentlands across the bay from Musselburgh on a cold, dark November teatime, seeing eternity in the seagull whose name was Nelson. My lasting memory of Amber by Autechre is listening to it on a Walkman while gathering emergency groceries in a Safeway hidden in a forbidding shopping mall in Shepherd's Bush of a dark Monday evening. Its steel rods of modest vertigo lent the experience the air of more dreamed (and not a good dream, either) than having been lived. The track from it I remember most clearly was, unsurprisingly given what went on to happen in a further, granted lifetime, was entitled "Montreal." The track Aphex Twin calls "Curtains" will always conjure in my mind ceaseless, gracious skating across a frozen lake hidden in a Norwegian forest, light in the darkness. As for "Summer Plays Out" by Plone, that puts me right back in Chadwell St Mary Cemetery; those were its belated, grudging times.

Yet to someone who twelve months previously was in ownership of the almost-definite certainty that he would never dance again, or anything like it, along swam "Dancers" as a buoy of rescue. Its rhythms glide rather than impose, its jetstream streaks unmistakeably and irrevocably from the grand New Classical nobility of Kraftwerk, gleaming like the Neumarkt in Dresden at eight o'clock of a morning in late April. There is love and there is acknowledgement of impermanence and possibly even destruction as the melody wanders its harmonic corridors - rooted in F major, moving to G, then a nerve-altering B minor before settling back in F, though further shades of prepared memory are provided by stray visits to D minor, C and A minor (and thereafter brief but marked visits to A flat and E minor). Its song never settles yet could not be more secure in its settlement. It could go on forever, or beyond the final Chigley bow, or never have happened at all, except inside your head in bed at five in the morning as you dream of bus routes which do not quite tally. You consider it as a dance beyond the end of "time."

Plaid are two people who used to be part of The Black Dog, who have never made a record I didn't like, and Polymer, appropriately their most macromolecular record, was their tenth album and my favourite since their fourth one (2001's Double Figure, Benet Walsh's guitar loop on "Eyen" being a newly-rediscovered harbour in itself). "Dancers" sprang out from its template unexpectedly like a reminding kiss. It sent me facing the front of the world.