Glasgow’s Somewhere Press have made quite an impression with their fledgling Somewhere Between Tapes series, providing standout debuts from Chantal Michelle, Man Rei and Alliyah Enyo, whose smudged fusion of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, choral music and dreampop provided one of last year’s most memorable album debuts. They return with their first label compilation, themed around the Blue Hour, that liminal stretch of time when the sun hangs below the horizon and the world doesn’t seem quite real. It’s a gorgeous evocation of blurred emotions, featuring contributions from Adela Mede, Man Rei, Chantal Michelle, Slowfoam, Dania, Astrid Øster Mortensen and a ruck of new names (to us) that we’ll be no doubt hearing more from.
The Blue Hour - that special time at dusk in summer when the light seems to glow soft and blue and the sounds of the world feel muted, has long been a source of inspiration in art, most famously with Guerlain’s indolic 1912 masterpiece L’Heure Bleue, a perfume that’s been described as an olfactory equivalent of an impressionist painting, and which attempted to capture that fleeting, melancholy moment where the smell of flowers also just happens to reach its peak.
For this compilation, Somewhere Press invited ten artists to convey the phenomenon, using a prompt from British writer-editor Hannah Pezzack. Each artist was asked to consider the historical and cultural significance of blue, tracking through its ancient association with melancholy, death and terror, to its later relationship with the divine and contemporary malaise. The colour's influence is far from universal, with many cultures only developing a word for it when the rare pigment was readily available, but its impact on the artistic world has been vast.
No stranger to these pages, Dania looks to the Romantic-era definition of blue on 'Lament', when German poet Novalis famously used Heinrich von Ofterdingen's dreams of a blue flower to symbolise the hopeless longing of the age. Singing softly over trembling strings, Dania establishes the mood with grace, burying almost inaudible whispers in pools of cavernous reverb. Mondlane takes a more liturgical approach, weaving solo voice around stretched, simmering bells sounding as phantasmagorical as Grouper and as spiritually resonant as Antonina Nowacka.
Angelina Nonaj contributes vocals to Georgia based artist santebela's 'If time bends', intoning slowly and purposefully over rainfall and clouded pads, and the album hits its emotional stride on 'Noise Dimensions', a rousing electro-orchestral composition from Anit Levan that reminds us of Cliff Martinez's flawless 'Solaris' soundtrack, gesturing towards the infinite vastness of the night sky.
The volume is turned down a little on the icy, Satie-like 'Winter go on' from Sweden's Astrid Øster Mortensen, who released the brilliant 'Sk æ rg å rdslyd' on Discreet Music last year. And Adela Mede sings assertively in Hungarian on 'Holnap' over slow piano chords and spiralling, softly psychedelic vocal loops. Elsewhere, the artists take the opportunity to use the blue hour to represent a space in-between places, with Rachel McDermott, aka Velvachell recording material in Mexico and sculpting the noisy, liminal 'Firewood (los colores)' back in Glasgow, while the set ends with its most entrancing sequence, Man Rei’s ‘Call’, a drift of synth pads, woodwind and voice that reminds us of the impossible melancholy of Malibu, or Sade’s ‘Cherish the Day’s slowed down 1000%.
Stunner.
