It’s been just about a year since we’ve covered a release from the Farfalla Records but projects from their catalog have continued to be in our daily rotations and in our radio program set list. A label with a fine taste for not only 70’s and 80’s inspired library music and cinematic treasures, but also further reaches of soundscapes exploring psychedelic, space funk and more. Farfalla Records continues to excite our ear drums with their upcoming release from Pleasurewood with “Electric Telepathy”, the second full-length LP from the Suffolk, UK duo of Paul Elliott and Dan Smith.
This new offering from the band embraces more of their vintage Hindi Cinema soundtrack influences — ‘Chump Change’, ‘The Hoverfly’ and ‘RAMMM’ could easily fit into the middle of an R.D. Burman score, each with their incongruous synthesis of different genres, infectious percussion, classical modes and funk chops.
There is also a slight sweep across a too-slow-to-disco tempo and feel with the moody Johnny Guitar Watson-esque slow burn of ‘Good Falcon’ up to the nonchalant four-to-the-floor of ‘Last Dance Saloon’ with its lyrical warning of digital over-saturation in our social-media saturated world and a foreboding of the mini-monoliths sat in the palms of our hands that in a Kubrickian way threaten to cosmically absorb us all as a species into their individual jet-black abysses.
And then, coming into focus like a sweet slice of disjointed, lo-fi, 8 bit space disco, ‘Mojave Desert’ is a slacker-strut with telephone vocals dub guitars, dry cosmic synths and futurist Farfisa organ driven by an almost Acid-Jazz meets Post-Punk Bass line, the song is autobiographical in its account of an excursion along the 29 Palms Highway reflecting on an escape from the City of Angels not so far away, up into the stark psychedelic desert realm.
There is a lot to unpack in this record and yet more to discover so it will be best to allocate 40 minutes in a comfortable dimly-lit room with eyes closed and maybe a cognac in hand, to have a deep-dive into its well-travelled and esoterically funky grooves.