Recently, a friend generously shared a fairly rank video in a group chat. It featured an open manhole cover with a length of blue piping descending into an underground tunnel system. After a moment or two of faint gurgles and twitching hosing, a huge stinking brick of toilet waste sludged its way through the narrow duct like a giant faecal slug. It clogged up the entire opening, causing mud-coloured discharge to rise to the brim and threaten to spill out into the road. A series of flatulent sounds followed, as if someone was slurping up a bowl of Angel’s Delight with a Dyson, and the greasy turd tower wobbled, tottered, toppled and slithered off further down the cess way, leaving the blue pipe rinsing the subterranean u-bend until it was clean enough to shit your breakfast into.
If I were in the habit of anthropomorphising sewers, I’d guess that the satisfying flood of relief accompanying the removal of that hefty blockage is not entirely dissimilar to how it feels listening to Sussex resident Kemper Norton’s new record. Tall Trees (And Other Tales) scrubs, purges, and washes away brown brain fug. It squeegees your mind’s eye. It’s a synaptic spring clean, the glow of your psyche the next morning following a deep shroom bath, that refreshing feeling of your consciousness sparking and shining like it’s fresh out of the box. This is what Norton has created here.
From the acid squelch of bass and cosmic burbles invoking a post-bacchanalian sunrise to scattered breakbeats and rapidly fingered sky-grazing sounds that mesh into a hurdy-gurdy drone, Tall Trees straddles the wave-lapped, gold-lit beach of your most halcyon mornings while also plunging into the wonky degradation witnessed on last night’s grotty dancefloor. The club-flirting synth wobbles, robotic swipes and whomps recall the staples of St Ives’ nightlife (such as Peggotty’s) namechecked in the track titles.
And it might be that my senses are already overwhelmed with festive cheer, but I swear that there’s a time-stretched version of East 17’s yuletide hit ‘Stay Another Day’ buried beneath the booming atmospherics of ‘Coming Up On Penrose Green’.
Kemper Norton takes the cortex-cleansing approach of A Rainbow in Curved Air and runs with it, adding his own tricksy doses of rhythm and a touch of the Balearics. It’s a brain enema. A brainema, if you will. It’s an approach that Jon Hopkins has tried to recreate with varied success. If you want the full skull valet, however, Norton’s your man.
