Infantjoy

 Infantjoy

With

The Observer Music Monthly, October 15 2006

by Simon Reynolds

Tis the season to be spooky. From the label Ghostbox to Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti albums, the notion of spectral music is the meme of the moment. Last year Infantjoy’s debut Where the Night Goes featured a cover of Japan’s synth-noir classic “Ghosts” . Now the sequel With arrives bearing a manifesto of sorts in the form of “Absence”. “It is necessary to speak of the ghost” intones Paul Morley, half of Infantjoy alongside ex-Auteur James Banbury. “Speak to the spectre, engage it… … do not command it… but dance with it… We are always haunted by ghosts and we cannot freely choose what we will be haunted by.”

With is something of a ghost version of Where the Night Goes, encompassing  remixes of the latter’s tracks by various kindred, erm, spirits in the electronic field as well as all-new tracks like “A Haunted Space” (sensing a bit of theme here?). “Ghosts” itself rematerializes in a spare, stealthy treatment by Popolous that gives even more prominence to the gorgeous vocals of Sarah Nixey, whose uncanny Kate Bush-like tones conjure up a parallel pop universe where the raven-haired goddess fronted Japan in David Sylvian’s stead. Isan’s remake of “Composure” transports the original’s rolling, reverberant piano chords into a frosted wonderland of electronic tingles and sample-stretched sighs.

Sound’s insubstantiality, the way that music always elude our attempts to fix and define,  is a major Morley obsession, and in this spirit With keeps hazy the question of authorship and attribution, so that you’re never quite sure who’s remixing whom. “Someone with Handshake” for instance, appears to be a collaboration between two guest producers, Someone and Handshake, with Infantjoy’s involvement quite possibly limited to having convened the encounter.  Unless the track’s digitally mangled voice, which sounds like it’s covered with furry spikes like a crystal forming in a solution, is actually  Morley’s. By the track’s end, its heavily-processed beats are so encrusted with gnarly texture, the groove almost grinds to a halt.

Infantjoy confirms Morley’s membership of a select group of rock writers who’ve crossed the line into music-making without disgracing themselves. A concept album about Erik Satie,  Where the Night Goes formed a 20th Century modernism continuum with the Art of Noise: the Futurism and Dada coordinates of 1983’s Into Battle, the Debussy-meets-drum’n’bass of AoN’s resurrection in the late 1980s. The claims for Satie are slightly overblown (“just about every radical musical movement of the past one hundred years” traceable back to Trois Gymnopedies and “furniture music”? Tell that to Duke Ellington, James Brown, King Tubby, and a good dozen more--mostly black--innovators). But the fantasy underlying this polemic-- an alternative history of pop in which America and rock’n’soul never existed, a straight line from Russolo through Stockhausen, Pierre Henry, Kraftwerk, Eno, Oval, to, well, Infantjoy--makes for a compellingly dissident vision, with an absorbing, eerie sound to match.

reissued in acknowledgement of the return to action of the Art of Noise (can't work out if Morley is involved in this incarnation of AoN) with the just-out Balance - Music for the Eye and Dream On with the Art of Noise