Merry Peers - Merry Peers (2019)

A restless Slip deliver their fourth release of 2019 with Brad Henkel & Yoshiko Klein’s mercurial debut, tracing etheric lines from scrabbly haptic noise to wistful ambient via 4th world peals and midnight jazz vibes.

Unfolding in two durational halves, ‘Merry Peers’ appears to be an ironic moniker for the duo’s modest, coy and quiet style of composition. Using Henkel’s trumpet, plus synth, daubs of voice, and carefully applied FX, they form a microcosm unto themselves, one that takes in three minutes of visceral extended technique and piercing high register tones, before fading into the thing proper - a sublime arc of ambient synth pads infiltrated by blithe self-help slogans, and leading down the garden path to phosphorescing blooms of dubwise, 4th world jazz, Vangelis-like synth brass flares, and dilapidated ambient-pop song.

The effect is richly dreamlike comfortingly lonely, and smudged in all the right places for a perfectly elusive grip on the duo’s waking reality, stemming for the immersion in Berlin’s fecund underground. There’s no real big statement or difficult concept behind ‘Merry Peers’, just a wry expression of the strangeness and melancholy of the human condition that will surely resonate with daydreamers and lovers of anything from Felicia Atkinson or Teresa Winter.