BOO – Love, Loss, and Redemption
VICTORIA KINGHAM
BOO – (Battery Operated Orchestra) make “highly charged electronica with incredibly addictive melodies” and are an independent act now based in St Leonards. Their new album Sea Views Soft Rains, was made during the year in which they moved here from Newhaven. It’s out on stream now, and is to be released on CD in early August.
For everyone but the fortunate few who can survive solely on the quality of their music, their notoriety, or their retrospectively nostalgic appeal, sale of a modern album is much more than the simple laying down of ten or twelve quality music tracks. This – BOO’s eighth studio product – is, like many contemporary outputs, a concept album, based around pictures of an apparently fading seaside town.
For your £17 album price you get not only twelve carefully-synthesised songs, a box lovingly folded with their own hands, but also 15 photographs. The whole package is intentionally fadeable, mutable, easily-damaged. It’s based around themes of love, loss, and redemption, ‘refracted through rain-streaked windows, empty promenades and abandoned ballrooms.’
This is a sophisticated collection of impeccably-produced, wholly electronic tracks The voices are part of the digital whole – controlled, measured, pitch-constant; the beat is crystal clear, decibel-sharp, bpm-consistent. What in other genres we might regard as the normal ebb and flow of musical engagement – natural variations in rhythm, pace, volume, pitch, sustain, and a lot of other things that imbue music with emotion, become secondary to a pinpoint-sharp, other-worldly exactitude. Why not? We live in a world dominated by these kind of images, where the medium is, definitively, the message.
BOO are Brigitte Rose, born in Tasmania, and Chris Black, from Scotland, who now live here. Album release is 3 August.
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