Leafcutter John — Yes! Come Parade with Us

I first encountered Leafcutter John (John Burton) as a member of Seb Rochford's freewheeling jazz group Polar Bear. I subsequently became familiar with him as a solo artist of rare stylistic breadth and creativity. One moment he's playing the accordion, the next he's improvising on a system that integrates MAX MSP with a light activated interface that looks like a chess board covered in snakeskin. Yes! Come Parade with Us is the follow-up to his Resurrection LP from 2015.

The principle components of the record are John's modular synth and a set of field recordings produced over four days on the North Norfolk coast in the summer of 2017. The only other contributors are drummers Tom Skinner and Seb Rochford himself who lend their percussive skills to Doing the Beeston Bump and Dunes respectively. The former track opens the record in a pleasantly upbeat, almost jaunty fashion. John's synth tinkles and twinkles over the sounds of footsteps across a shingle beach, while Skinner's drums punctuate with flurries and crescendos. The melody and ebullient pace of the track actually brought to mind some of Explosion in the Sky's punchier material. Barring Rochford's contribution on the final track, from here on in its John alone.

Recent years have seen an increasing number of electronic musicians using modular synths on their records. This is no doubt in part to the increased affordability and availability of the technology compared to decades past. But there's also a sense that a new generation of enthusiasts are taking these instruments of infinite possibility into new unexplored territory, developing their own signature styles along the way. John's playing draws out the instrument's capability for complex harmonics and melodic lines which he endows with considerably more dynamic thrust and songcraft than you often get with modular players. The album title track is a squelching piece of acid techno imagined by the Ghost Box label, while Elephant bones takes a folk-horror turn in its skeletal electronics, rattling percussion and the faintest hint of bowed strings.

Stepper Motor brings us back to the seaside and the overall summery sound which hangs across the record. Gulls circle overhead, swept upwards by synth arpeggios and what could be crotales or gamelan. The otherwise manic bliss of John's sound takes a reflective moment out on the slow dubbed out techno of This way out . Recordings from out of the Kings Arms, Blakeney vie for attention with panoramic synth pads and scratchy staccato drum patterns. It's still blissed out, but in more of a 'putting one's feet up at the pub after a long coastal walk on a hot summers day' kind of way. It captures well that simultaneous feeling of mild exhaustion, contentment and creeping intoxication. Indeed that could be apt description for the record as a whole, which at a time of dramaturgical modular madness and new-age synth revivalism instead takes the path of melody, tunefulness and above all, fun. Lovely stuff, as Alan Partridge might say.