I’ve been looking for a way to address the one thing that has touched every aspect of life, […]
family
My name is Dimitry Fedotov Vitienko, forgive me the spelling if I got those words wrong, I found out only my name a few hours back…
“Let it serve as a platform for free form and thought, while enjoyment creeps in without warning.”
Harsh isolation, dystopian dreamscapes, semi-connected catharsis caught up in electronic precision.
That’s the evolving sound of Blancmange 2.0; collections of stripped down half hooks, building in escalating elaborations, repeated in sheets of thin ice and cool water. This is Neil Arthur from 2016’s Unfurnished Rooms, through to 2017’s Fader and Near Future, through this year’s Blancmange album Wonderlust.
(…and just what it means to want to be ‘somewhere else’)
A show reviewed last year at Rescue Rooms, Nottingham was the first time I really encountered Blancmange. I’d had an awareness, an occasional knowledge of the odd track or accolade, but that show was my main introduction.
Right after the show, once the lights got turned up, I tried grabbing a couple of words. It was last night of tour and then wasn’t the time but I was assured I could grab a word sometime.
Back home I had intent and purpose. I made shapes and sense of music and words and all time was divided, devoted. I made time to draw lines from without to within and direct them back out in new twists. People around me helped me build a home studio and they’d switch out the songs mine to ours. Back home I made time to make something with all of my tools at my tips.
Here we move place to place with a speed and a greed that breeds barely no time to take in. We breathe in the air but don’t pick up the scents, time to reflect slim to none.
I’m a semi permanently disgruntled ass, verging on childishly excitable. I’m vein, over confident and egotistical. I’m a self deprecating jangle of nerves. I’ve just about learnt to get comfy with me and now someone else has to too, and oh does she get my sympathy.
Not too many families are neat. Webs and ties, some loved, some unloved, splinters and fractures fix and unfix; A thousand reasons appear to unite and divide. From the line down to me I’ve been lucky. In the line from me down, not so or not yet.
Every daytime we get closer passes fine / It’s in darkness were it tears the tear inside / Each twenty-four hours closer that we get / I sleep less and I re-measure my regrets…
Rats on the Run 