Spencer sent me a song to follow last week's Cindy D'Lequez Sage/ Brian Eno song, The Moon's Lament. Our series last year was all gnarly techno/ acid house but for this run of weekly posts Spencer's decided it's going to be lyrics. This week's song is Make Me Tea by Woo.
Edit: link now updated and correct.
Make Me Tea sounds very English, and puts me in mind of that pastoral, 1967, Syd/ Barrett/ Robert Wyatt kind of English music, where folk, nursery rhymes and psychedelia meet. At first it seems quite whimsical but as the song plays and the instruments lock together, and the male and female voices drift by, it becomes absorbing, entrancing and emotive, entering a dreamlike state. 'Take me to the place you love/ And I will love you too/ Sing to me your favourite song/ And I will sing along with you', they sing, and sound like they means every word.
Woo are Mark and Clive Ives, multi- instrumentalist brothers who have been making albums from South London and Surrey since 1982, albums fusing acoustic guitars and clarinets with synthesisers and keyboards. In 1990 they put out their third album Into The Heart Of Love, a twenty three song opus available (then) only on cassette- slow paced, acoustic sounding with synths providing texture, atmospheric and sounding like it has come from a sealed room or a time capsule dug up from someone's garden. Spencer used the word beguiling. I can't find a better one.
Into The Heart Of Love is now available digitally at Bandcamp so there's no need to go searching for a cassette player in the garage or second hand online. It probably sounds best played on cassette mind, the tape hiss and running the tape forward at the end of side one all part of the experience.
5 comments:
Wrong link to the track?
You can access it via the Bandcamp link
Oops. Will have to wait until later to fix it.
Link now fixed.
This really is quite lovely. Their descriptor 'atemporal music' is a pretty apt one.
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