South London-based dancer, producer and choreographer Bianca Scout likes switching characters. While last year’s album Pattern Damage saw her as a ballerina trapped in time, haunted by the joy and trauma of her discipline; the new album Now You See Me, Now You Don’t (under the name Marina Zispin, in a duo with Martyn Reid), is suited for goth ravers with a dark heart. The album’s decidedly nocturnal world mixes synthpop noir and ghostly vocals but makes space for sleek Roland TR-606 grooves and dancefloor workouts with a seductive pulse. It sounds like 4AD’s 1980s catalogue via the pipeline of Minimal Wave Records.
Scout provides spectral vocals and Reid apparently operates synths. Both originally come from the North-East of England, but artistically are embedded in different circles. While Scout pursued a career in London, hailed for her collaborations with artists including Mica Levi and Space Afrika; Reid stayed and dedicated his time to various darkwave projects. Scout credited one track on Pattern Damage, ‘Desert’, to ‘Marina Zispin’. Sometimes, during her performances, she diverts from the patiently built atmosphere, somewhere between Aronofsky’s Black Swan and the Twin Peaks Roadhouse to 80s French disco, puts on a ski jacket and goggles, and starts to exercise the coldwave synths of ‘Ski Resort’ from Zispin’s 2023 debut EP Life & Death: The Five Chandeliers Of The Funereal Exorcisms.
The opening track of Now You See Me, Now You Don’t, ‘Death Must Come’, uses warped synths in the way of Gerald Donald’s projects, Arpanet and Heinrich Mueller. The following ‘Piece of Mind’ is based on a guitar melody, thick kick beats and swelling synths reminiscent of Jessy Lanza circa Oh No. ‘The Tudors’ is the album’s most potent earworm, which loosely tackles crime and punishment under the reign of the House of Tudors. “Are you prepared to die?” sings Scout alluringly in the refrain, where her hazy vocals recall Carla Dal Forno’s You Know What It’s Like. Other tracks hint at a lost side project of Legowelt airing on Intergalactic FM during the night hours.
Marina Zispin work with references to 1980s post-punk or dream pop in a similar ways as some of the bands on Blackest Ever Black (especially Tropic of Cancer, besides Carla Dal Forno). The encyclopaedic knowledge doesn’t result in pure nostalgia or recreation, but they add their own twist to it. Now You See Me, Now You Don’t balances cold-sweating synths with hair-raising ambience filled with eerie 4AD-like tinkling resembling broken clockwork, as in the closing track ‘The Scythe’, layered with uncanny harmonica and Scout breathing heavily to the melody rather than singing. Marina Zispin have found here a sweet spot between Euro disco frivolity and something more arcane, which leaves you excited even after repeated listens.
