Baikonour - For The Lonely Hearts Of The Cosmos
[Melodic]

Starting with the celestial track that opened Melodic’s Tracks For Horses compilation, For The Lonely Hearts Of The Cosmos breathes new life into electronic music, by plundering the analogue past.

Coltan Anyone? would sit well on one of Cherrystones compilations, with its heavy dampened bassline and jazzist groove. Girls in oversized sunglasses are probably pouting to this track down Montmartre way as we speak.

Tangibly French, stunningly cool, worlds apart from his more commercially successful compatriots Air, Baikonour weaves a landscape of urban glitz, seedy glamour and carefree hedonism.

Proto Cœur is a traffic jam of a song, all clicking indicators and buzzing engines, that breaks free of the traffic and spins you down backstreets and alleyways with an urgency that threatens to slam you into the nearest brick wall.

Rusk Plasmique delivers one delicious minute of stargazing awe, a cosmic beauty in every clichéd sense of the phrase that gently comes back to earth in the shadow of Mount Fuji and segues into Hoku To Shin Ken. Mesmeric psychedelia, with chiming guitars by Etienne Rodes and drums by Eiji F Morotomi, this is one of the best come-down tracks ever written.

There’s an ancient calmness to this album, as well as the seedy urban glamour. There are hints that inspiration has been drawn from Kevin Shields (think the Lost In Translation soundtrack) as well as Boards Of Canada, Kraftwerk and Can. The atavistic familiarity doesn’t just stem from Baikonour’s musical influences, though – it’s embedded in the instruments he used and his decision to program his Mac with digital emulations of 60s compressors and equalisers during the recording and mixing process.

Statica is a gentle minute and a half of chiming Japanese-inflected guitar, followed by a slowly rising wall of fuzz that echoes Canada’s The Besnard Lakes on the equally brief Interquaalude, before the album closes with the winking gem that is Ultra Lazuli. Pared down electronica married to Hammond-driven 60s psychepop, this track is a road trip down the Autobahn in a yellow sportscar. Probably a Maserati, strangely enough.

If there are other beings out there in the cosmos, then this album is for everyone of them who lives in a city – those rat race hubs of noise and exhilaration where you’re never more alone than in a crowd of strangers. It’s an album to plug you back into humanity, to wash away the grime, to make you futuristically new and anciently familiar. Lose yourself in its beauty.

(P.S. Wait a few minutes after the last bars of Ultra Lazuli. You’ll be sucked through a wormhole and spat out in a galaxy far, far away...)