LP Edition of 360.

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After a handful of whacked-out cassettes & CDRs, for labels as discerning as Chocolate Monk and Beartown, this Nottingham trio has final made their debut LP, and it is a beautiful, swirling cone of sounds.

Unlike some of their more savage kith, Food People‘s basic template is based less on explosive dynamics than it is on twisted invention. Their music is rarely overtly aggressive or ornery. Its power is drawn from quietly disorienting musical details that are assembled and fiddled-with at a patient pace. Sometimes the sounds they use are taped, at others they come from various strings (both plucked and bowed), maybe some simple reeds and possibly even a key or percussion or two. Can’t exactly tell without actually seeing them, but this confusion is part of the music’s appeal.

And Many Glorious Petals is as appealing as any instrumental record you’ll spin this year.

Genteel backwards-masking lends “Cheese Dreams from Oxney Green” a feel akin to Fripp & Eno collaborating with Orchid Spangiafora. “Eat Paper” combines guitar-string-buzz-riffing, imaginary percussion and fiddle sawing into a deep meditation on the transitive existence of form. The way the flute tones (or whatever they are) layer-up at the end of “Old Thresh” put me in mind of Robert Dick’s compositional gambits, before leading into a brief piece called “Blue Solar Arrow,” which is redolent of the New Orleans tripping scene in Easy Rider. There are also tracks like “Scrim,” impossible to unravel in terms of instrumentation, but managing to sound amazingly tripped-out in the way they flip toggle switches inside your brain’s sonic-receptors.

Many Glorious Petals is not a long album, but it’s got more audio nooks and crannies than you can easily explore. And every spin reveals new dimensions of otherness.

Burrow in today.

-Byron Coley, 2023

The Quietus

MUSIC VIDEO LINK

FOOD PEOPLE ARE

MATTHEW HAMBLIN, LILA MATSUMOTO AND GREG THOMAS

MASTERED BY CALEB MULKERIN AT TANK 28

LAYOUT BY DERWENT

ALBUM ART BY MATTHEW

Food People

Releases

Many Glorious Petals