You could be streaming all of the brand new UK bass album by Sherwood & Pinch, Man Vs. Sofa, at the bottom of this post right now. But instead you’re here, reading this, like a sucker. It’s as if, rather than walking directly through the entrance to a massive party, you paused to listen to a guy in a ratty sweater who was standing by the door shouting about how much fun he had inside.
Sherwood is Adrian Sherwood, the English record producer and dub adventurer I interviewed for DM last summer, during the all-too-brief period when it was possible for me to feel smug about Brexit. The music on his second LP with the Bristol dubstep artist Pinch gets its science-fiction quality by superimposing claustrophobia on a wide-open dub soundscape: it gives you the experiences of contraction and expansion at once, like a spacesuit or a TARDIS.
However you interpret the title, couch-lock is not the vibe. It’s late-night, clenched-jaw music. You could, perhaps, bathe your mind all day in the jazz chords resonating in Martin Duffy’s piano on “Midnight Mindset,” if they did not hang over beats the press materials describe as “technoid, insectoid and paranoid.”
Sherwood’s longtime collaborator Skip McDonald, who played guitar in the Sugarhill Gang before he joined Mark Stewart’s band and founded Tackhead, is on here. Lee “Scratch” Perry appears on “Lies” to matter-of-factly inform the world’s liars of their damnation, as serenely as a postman delivers a disconnection notice. The London rapper Taz turns up on the last track, “Gun Law.” And is that Buckminster Fuller talking about infinity and self-deprogramming on “Unlearn”?
Of particular interest to the DM reader is the Sherwood & Pinch remake of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s theme from Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, the 1983 film starring David Bowie as a British officer in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, which enters unexplored territory. (My friend from German Army recognized the tune immediately when we were listening to Man Vs. Sofa in his car yesterday.)
Have a listen, after the jump…