Somewhere Press

V/a

The Blue Hour

Somewhere Press

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...