Manchester Collective - NEON - 1LP

NEON, the fourth studio release from Manchester Collective, contains a paradox at its heart. The album is unambiguously about the night, about dark city streets, evoking glass, concrete and slow, incessant rain. However, it is also by some margin the brightest, breeziest and most optimistic record by the group. Here, the seductive nocturnal rhythms of Hannah Peel and Steve Reich sit alongside music of a different sort – unsettling, introspective works by Lyra Pramuk and Julius Eastman.

Writing about her titular work, Peel notes that “Neon itself is opulence and decadence; bustling activity and loneliness”. This gets to the heart of the matter.

Electronic sounds and field recordings run through the record. In the titular ‘Neon’, Peel uses samples from Shinjuku Station in Tokyo to evoke teeming musical scenes full of life. Her joyful music is in many ways a reflection of Steve Reich’s Pulitzer Prize winning Double Sextet, the work that closes the album. The Double Sextet sees six members of the Collective performing against recordings of themselves in a virtuosic race to the finish.

Along the way, producer Lyra Pramuk makes her composing debut with ‘Quanta’, music inspired by Carlo Rovelli’s quantum physics headscratcher ‘The Order of Time’. ‘Quanta’ opens with the sound of a huge grandfather clock, at first keeping regular time, and then slowly dancing to a more flexible meter, waxing and waning, stuttering, and finally, stopping. “There is no universal time,” says Pramuk. “Quanta explores the notion that each of us has an individual sense of how time traces through our lives.”

‘Joy Boy’ by Julius Eastman is similarly obsessed with time. In the preface to the work, Eastman instructs the performers to “create ticker tape music”. This is time before the digital revolution – spools of tape, indented and pierced, transmitting messages across distance.