Paradise Cinema

Portico Quartet’s Jack Wyllie recorded this album in Dakar, Senegal, influenced by the sound of mbalax that played until six in the morning and regularly bled into his dreams and somnambulant frame of mind. And it’s that state, between awake and asleep, a blurry, nocturnal environ, that serves as the perfect description of this album. Opener ‘Possible Futures’ begins with swirls of percussion – the cut, looped and processed sounds of sabar and tama drums, as played by Khadim Mbaye and Tons Sambe respectively – that are buttressed by sinister drones, with occasional high-pitched signals acting as dramatic hyper-real pulses.

On ‘It Will be Summer Soon’ the drums become suffocating, like a night panic, hallucinations of some malevolent force knocking at the door. This disquiet continues on the title-track, its wailing sax lost in the landscape, like a dog roaming the street at night. The way that the drums unnaturally fade in and out of focus, and the ominous drones and distant sounds give the album the feel of an internal monologue, each instrument or texture becoming a feeling or opaque emotion that never quite resolve themselves. Portico Quartet have often headed into lean, minimal territory but never anything this emotive or filled with such portent.