RE-UP : Wingdisk - Time Is Running Out (Isonauta, 2004)

Ce n'est peut-être pas le titre que vous auriez voulu voir reuploader en premier, mais c'est quand même par celui-ci que je commence, parce qu'il me tient tout particulièrement à coeur et que c'est vraiment trop bête qu'il ne soit plus disponible.
Et voilà ce que j'en disais l'automne dernier :
Attention, voici une vraie rareté, et une sacrée pépite! Wingdisk est le duo de rêve de Ian Masters (ex-tête chercheuse des Pale Saints exilé au Japon) et Mark Tranmer (Gnac et moitié de Montgolfier Brothers avec Quigley). Des chansons rêveuses et des intermèdes exotiques. C'est impossible à trouver aujourd'hui, c'est la seule trace discographique du duo, et c'est d'une poésie et d'une finesse rares. De l'impressionnisme en musique? Ben oui!

Wingdisk
Time Is Running Out
10'' Isonauta ISO020 (France, 2004)

a1. Rio
a2. Kuro Tamago
b1. Departure Lounge
b2. Tachibana Lament

Note : This record includes singing, temple bells, old people wailing, guitars, cicadas, trains, piano, Mark Tranmer and Ian Masters. Recorded on hot days sometime between 2000 and 2002 in Manchester, London and Osaka.
Wingdisk is a duo comprised of former members of Pale Saints and the Montgolfier Brothers, and anyone familiar with those bands wouldn't be too surprised at the sound and tone of this EP. Very pretty, haunted songs are sequenced with the shorter bits to make two whole pieces, one for each side of the vinyl. Like with ex-Montgolfier Brother Mark Tranmer's previous duo, these songs have the quality of a soundtrack, subtle enough to work as mood music for some bittersweet scene of people doing stuff and saying things yet more than just aural wallpaper. There is something defiant in the unwillingness of the music to be too demonstrative, which would be noble but boring if it wasn't so captivating.
The quiet bossa-nova inspired "Rio" is, if anything, too brief, introducing a lovely chord progression outlined by Spanish guitars, piano, and a cyclical phrase played on what sounds like a backwards marimba or xylophone. It builds to the seven-word vocal - "Why don't we go back to Rio?" - only to fade out again. Drifting like motes of dust in a sunbeam, it passes away before becoming anything more, but it is very beguiling. Is it pop? Yeah, but it's too impressionistic to be just that.

C'est par ici (this way, please)