ISAN - Glow in the Dark Safari Set

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4...according to our Ant on Fri 18 Jun, 2010.

Always a pleasure to listen to anything by these guys and it seems like it has been a wee while since we had any new stuff. This is believe it or not their sixth album and as expected the quality set by previous releases is consistent. This is basically what you want from Isan, cool, slick, deep and perfectly crafted warm electronica with a few trick up its sleeve. I think there is a very early german electronic music influence at the for, perhaps Cluster etc. What's great about this is that it's a nice place to escape to but it never becomes too introverted and retains a sense of playfulness. But I guess that it's ultimately what has been so appealing about them over the years. Melodic, joyous yet still in a sort of alternative reality zone which is is a good place to be in my opinion. The precision and sparkle of their previous work is all here as well as the fact that they do kind of write songs and not just weird abstract stuff. Pop electronica in a way I guess. '64 Fire Damage' in particular is heartwarming as I imagine little lambs with pink ribbons around their necks prancing about to its pretty twinkles. Quality as always.

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Robin Saville and Antony Ryan, two English gentlemen who create music together under the nom de plume Isan, return with their sixth full length album for their spiritual home of Morr Music. It's been a few years since Isan's previous outing, the delectable electronic esoterica of Plans Drawn In Pencil, but our heroes haven't been lazy. "We played some lovely shows on the back of the album and then took an unintentional sabbatical," explains Robin.. Robin also released a critically acclaimed album himself, the agrarian electronica of Peasgood Nonesuch. No wonder it took them a while to
finish Glow In The Dark Safari Set. The results, in (ahem) time-honoured Isan tradition, are certainly worth the wait.
Opener, Channel Ten, with its Autobahn-assured poise, appropriately prefigures a body of work that is Isan's finest to date. A giddy sense of enjoyment suffuses the album - from the glistening rush of Merman Sound which segues into the soft focus sound world of its own coda seamlessly to the cinematic, techy strut of Grissette or the calmly oscillating and cascading melodies of Greencracked which evoke images of a retro-futurist utopia. Isan have always excelled at fashioning a quietly awe-inspiring music and Glow... is no exception. Even the title suggests a sense of wide-eyed-wonder. Such is the album's celestial hot-wired circuit board wizardry; Glow In The Dark Safari Set positively throbs, ebbs and flows with electronically refracted ideas and melodies - a digital tone poem sitting somewhere betwixt the cosy experimentation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the exotic sonic emissions of a top secret Düsseldorf studio circa 1975.

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