Daniel Figgis - ‘Catnapping 1992′ review
‘Catnapping 1992′ is the latest new track by Daniel Figgis. It’s available from Pristinus on a newly pressed and very limited shellac disc which spins at 78rpm and gives you all that wonderful and very authentic hiss and crackle. The label plan more in the future. For this review I’m listening to the clean digital version and am loving it.
This is a co-write with Vincent Doherty, who was one of the collaborators on Figgis’ masterpiece, Skipper (1994), in fact its joyful mood and earworm melody makes it sound like an outtake from that album. It somehow gives me a visual image of a cartoon wave and that nautical reference also ties in with the theme of Skipper. As it’s a new recording I am guessing ‘1992′ might be an oblique reference to the years leading up to the recording of that album. Similar to his recent ‘engine: detail’ on Front End Synthetics (see my review here), guitars of all varieties are central to the sound but they are mostly acoustic and strummed. A viola also makes a crucial appearance. The track has an ancient but timeless quality to it and only leaves me wanting more.
I like the idea of the track being made available on a shellac disc, it gives it an instant patina of age, makes it very collectable and goes against the grain of music being just a digital file. The shellac sound reminds me of a more extreme version of the layers of vinyl crackle found on music by The Caretaker but of course Daniel Figgis has mined this sound before with Princess Tinymeat in the mid 1980s. As far as I can tell the B-side is the same track cut at a more standard 33 or 45 rpm. Do you need a gramophone to play it I don’t know but you can see a video of just this happening here. You can download the shellac (crackly) version at this Bandcamp link and the clean digital version on iTunes. There is some rationale for the shellac pressing on the BC link too. Recommended and more please.
Stephen Rennicks