A common theme through The Soft Pink Truth’s records of the 2020s is music’s ability to build sanctuaries. As the world’s got harsher, SPT’s albums have got lusher. 2020’s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, recorded during the first Trump presidency, saw the project, led by Matmos’s Drew Daniel, blur propulsive deep house into velvety minimal composition. 2022’s Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?, made during pandemic lockdown, is a glimmering electro-orchestral record played by a ‘fourteen-piece virtual disco band’. Latest album Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? meanwhile, is a suite of largely drum-less chamber music played on harps, pianos, acoustic guitar and strings.
At a time when far-right politics were rising, Sinning and Deeper embraced the histories of house and disco as soundtracks to sanctuaries for marginalised communities. The records felt on a continuum running from early disco into house and onwards through Patrick Cowley and Arthur Russell. Such Delightful Times follows the same arc, even as it sees SPT venture furthest from the dancefloor. It’s the sound of joyous, playful experimentation squatting the rarefied worlds of chamber ensembles and concert halls. Showing that clubs aren’t the only possible sonic enclaves, and the surest way to avoid being co-opted or ensnared by sinister forces is to keep moving.
It’s an album that teeters. Throughout, strings arranged by Ulas Kurugullu switch between swooning Romantic grandeur, Ligeti-esque glissandos and a levity evoking the orchestrations of Chic. The opening track is a bounding maze of soaring violins and jovial bass, played with acoustic instruments but seemingly mapped to an electronic framework. ‘Orchard’, anchored by Bill Orcutt’s earthly acoustic guitar, has strings that rove and twist in bucolic wonder.
Such Delightful Times evades binary categories. Funkiness sneaks into the ornate, dissonance duels with the genteel, ostentatious sweeps of cinematic pomp deflate into cartoonish tangles. It’s most potent on ‘Phrygian Ganymede’ where angelic flurries lead into keening violins before a downpour of chaotic piano, dissonant strings and Zach Rowden (from the duo Tongue Depressor)’s growling bass. The track exists as peculiar bridge – both avant-garde and possible soundtrack to clownish farce. Even when Daniel steps furthest into abstraction it never feels like pretensions towards aloof, high art alienation.
The release notes say the album aims to build “a makeshift queer refuge in the face of surrounding collapse.” As its title suggests, Such Delightful Times is not utopian, it’s as much a rearguard action as an avant-garde one. Safe spaces away from the boot of fascism have been forged by targeted communities since long before everything started turning hellish circa-2016. The Soft Pink Truth keeps their soundtracks evolving and evading.
