A Lily - PSALM018: Virgin Stoner: Works 2001-2004 (2024)

“An evocative space of memory and dream on clouds of glowing synthesis…It connects on a deeper level.”
The Quietus

“Stunning, oneiric, and otherworldly.”
Bandcamp Daily

British-Maltese musician James Vella - founder of Phantom Limb - revisits his adolescence following the chance discovery of a cache of homemade CDs created in his teens, collecting an album of electronic works for the family PC, cracked software, and dial-up internet that recalls early 2000’s IDM and electronica.

“I was poking through some boxes at my dad’s house, in my old bedroom, trying to find toys for my toddler to play with,” Vella writes, “and I stumbled across a CD-R I made when I was at school. The home-printed cover was faded, but the title - Like Father Like Sun - still legible. By amazing coincidence, I had recently hired a data recovery company to revive old hard-drives in the hopes of reclaiming the songs from this period, but had no luck. It’s been over twenty years since I heard these songs, and I was overjoyed to have found them. So I looked a little further in the same boxes and found four more CDs, all full of school-age explorations into electronic music.”

While acknowledging that this work is “juvenilia, in worship to the musicians I listened to back then,” Vella is keen to stress his continued interest in the compositions. “It was like having a time machine,” he tells us. “Memories of creating these specific pieces, of where I was in my life then, all came flooding back at once.” Many of them were created on cracked versions of early 2000’s sequencing software, and some on demo versions that restricted recording options, meaning the tracks were committed, via the family’s computer, to his dad’s cassette deck and subsequently redigitised (by reversing the cable). And while much of it “sounds like what it is - a teenage boy messing around with softsynths while I was supposed to be doing homework,” Vella was convinced enough by eight of the tracks to warrant creating new collection Virgin Stoner for release on his own label. “These songs were the most important thing in the world back then,” he says. “Sixteen year old me would be over the moon to know that they would be released on a real record label.”

“Iatrojigen” is a cod-coinage combining Latin and Japanese words. Pulsing with glitchy energy, corvid vocal caws, and fizzing Idioteque synth pads, the track bears the influence of the kind of solo electronic artists found in Vella’s Soulseek account at the time. It was taken from a CD gifted by James to his two closest friends (and, according to the home-printed liner notes, intended for their ears only), with whom he eventually went on to form the acclaimed instrumental band yndi halda. “Solar Systems” is a later track, probably written towards the end of school life, not far off Vella’s debut solo album wake:sleep, released by short-lived (but momentarily prosperous) San Francisco label Dynamophone when Vella was 19. It is a little more nuanced and through-composed, arranged and structured with more finesse than the earlier bedroom jams recorded here, but still bright-eyed and aglow with innocent invention.

Later in the album, the trio of “Tex's Honky Tonk Motor Stampede”, “Splinterwave Masterform”, and “Liver Salts” were evidently recorded on the fly. Vella remembers “ctrl-alt-tabbing between various software windows that almost crashed the computer, using the QWERTY keyboard to play the parts, and feeding a guitar lead from the PC headphone socket to my dad’s tape recorder to capture the sounds.” The result is a dusty, stoned (probably truthfully), psychedelic ramble.

“This music is probably like I was at the time,” Vella tells us. “Dorky, naive, lovesick.” While the material is certainly blessed with the discovery and wonder of youth, it is also genuine in its emotional expression, its ambition, and its pursuit of class.