Clever Bunny - Each Time - 12" EP

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Clever Bunny is the twitching, long eared remedy for the restlessness of 2 old friends.

Giles Allen and Pete Saville, a psychiatrist and artist respectively, share a love of music tinkering and together ran the Carbon Lodge rural recording studio for 6 years, where Clever Bunny was born from late night sessions and a photo of a precocious rabbit playing a toy piano.

The original sound of Clever Bunny was a lo-fi collision of Allen’s penchant for UK Garage & House and Saville’s addiction to early Croydon eski-beat and 70s library music. The only trace of that beginning is a lost 7” called 'Liquid Kosh' carrying their distinctive keyboard rabbit emblem screen-printed on the sleeve. There are rumours that other early material will surface on a forthcoming Slowfoot compilation.

Forward to 2024, Clever Bunny is the duo’s ongoing commitment to meet annually and experiment within a broad range of genres; beat, bass and voice driven, and to pursue their long form conversation about atheism and metaphysics, synthesis, serendipity, impossibility and the nudging of improvisation into familiar structures. Their recent desire to start documenting their activities led them to an off grid cabin in the woods near Horsham. It is a place of willing entanglement, where a handful of synths, a computer, a melodica and a pneumatic organ lead them on a merry dance.

'Each Time' captures the spirit of this latest wave of Clever Bunny’s output.

The title track’s lyrics were inspired by Saville’s fascination with apiculture and composting, observing the exchanges between insects, plants and the wonder of fungal mycelia. Frank Byng’s (This Is Not This Heat, Snorkel, Daniel O'Sullivan) impeccable drumming, which infuses this teapot of an EP throughout, drives the song on a swampy swelter, while Ryan Jacob’s (SAULT, Bonobo) 2-tone style trumpet peppers its waltzing trek.

'Uninhabitable' is a lament for our World, a Wiley-esque loop soon dissolves, voices are enpaddened and bit reduced, Phillip Granell’s (Phaedra Ensemble, London Contemporary Orchestra, Gavin Bryars) violin and viola lead sparse skittering beats and Byng’s smart bell work in a tragic dirty tumbling down.

'Rolling In The Hay' is a bottom heavy urgent love song. With its chin-wide nod to Wookie, synthetic beats propel a rolling bassline and vocal through slate grey skies to another world, where we breath different oxygen.

What to make of the 'Lizard Zoo'? Public Image Ltd meets The Blockheads? This lumbering whiplash dozer of a song is a cathartic rant, a commanding plea to be left goddamn alone! Its indignant vocal and melodica describe a fantasy space where the noisy and feckless can spend time cooling off.

'Olinda' was built around an improvisation on an op-1 and a microfreak, then packaged for more one-take mistreatment at the mercy of Frank Byng’s drum sticks into what might be the sound of Photek on a rowing machine. Byng’s intricate fills & breaks lead the listener towards the collapsing crescendo and the end of the EP.

The Wire described the Slowfoot label as releasing music “that might otherwise fall between cracks, but always hits the groove” and that “has evolved organically by occupying the grooves between genres.” Clever Bunny’s Each Time EP does both.