It's over ten years since Portico Quartet were nominated for the Mercury Prize and they've developed into an even more potent force in that time.
Their 2017 album - their most electronic to date - Art in the Age of Automation is absolutely stunning. Last year, they followed that up with a companion mini-album called Untitled (AITAOA #2).
To come back this week, after not much time between records, with something equally worth tuning into, conveys their unrepressed ability to cook up some of the most intoxicating music around.
The track below 'Signals In The Dusk' is the first piece of music to be released from their forthcoming album Memory Streams, out 4 October on Gondwana Records.
The sound is built predominantly from the instruments they are best known for: hang, saxophone, drums and bass. But it is not constrained by conventional expression of these instruments; something most palpable during the swarms of percussive and melodic flourish heard in the most saturated parts of the dynamic mix. The music is exhilarating thanks to unpredictable movements and surprising layers of sound that take your breath away.
Speaking of the album as a whole, the bands drummer Duncan Bellamy says in a press release: “We wanted to create something that had texture, fibre and space to it. Something that felt vivid, real and alive."
And giving some context to the title, Bellamy feels Memory Streams is about a "torrent of imagery, accessing and reliving archived memories, which perhaps aren’t even your own.”
Memory Streams tracklist:
'With, Beside, Against’
‘Signals In The Dusk’
‘Gradient’
‘Ways Of Seeing’
‘Memory Palace’
‘Offset’
‘Dissident Gardens’
‘Double Helix’
‘Immediately Visible’
Portico Quartet UK gigs:
November
02 - Barbican Centre, London
06 - Gorilla, Manchester
08 - Sage 2, Gateshead
