Bianca Scout - Pattern Damage (2024)

Muzzing the membranes between chamber music, contemporary dance, dark pop and ethereal ambience, Klein, Mica Levi and Space Afrika collaborator Bianca Scout distills a decade of multidisciplinary work at the service of her maziest, most enchanted album, moving between diaristic ephemera, demure post-punk and chamber ambient, and cracking open bewildering crypto-romantique wormholes in the process.

A triple threat dancer/musician/performer, Bianca Scout has been a shapeshifting presence and connective tissue between alternative experimental and pop musicks since her self-released debut album and guest spots on early Klein sides in the mid 2010s. Following duties with her own industrial pop duo Marina Zispin, ‘Pattern Damage’ is her absorbing 5th solo side, breezily vacillating the song-structured and etheric aspects of her sound around themes of technocratic dystopia and chopped ’n screwed sacred music in a manner that resonates with works by James Ferraro, Teresa Winter, Mica Levi’s London Sinfonietta cut-ups, and, of course, her longtime spar Klein. It sits well in the Sferic catalogue too, with a gauzily smudged, late night appeal mutual to her labelmates and which resonates the urbane ennui of their wallpaper music for tarnished new builds.

In ‘Pattern Damage’, more than ever, we hear Scout pulling extra-musical influences into her arrangements. The freely metered pace and space of theatrical staging and choreography for dance offers a guiding hand to her process. Together with another “movement artist”-turned-musician Malik Nashad Sharpe aka Darkmarik who appears on scene-setter ’Forest Spirit’ and later in ‘Almost Nothing’, and with fellow dancer Kendra Chiagoro-Noel aka NWAKKE chiming into ‘Passage’ - a flip of Allegri’s ‘Miserere Mei Deus’ - Scout flits quick, then slow, between passages of febrility and elegance, melancholy and reflection. Bristol's Mun Sing helps out on 'Midnight', a heart-piercing serenade that's led by detuned guitar twangs and Scout's lilting, clipped voice, providing one of the album's most intimate moments, primed for extended play on the back of heavy eyelids.