Steve Queralt & Michael Smith 'Sun Moon Town' 12" EP
Steve Queralt, bass player of pioneering shoegazers RIDE, and the writer and film-maker MIchael Smith have joined forces for a stunning four-track EP, released on Bytes. Over Steve’s exceptional electronic soundscapes, Michael provides spoken-word vocals in his lulling Hartlepool tones, distilling excerpts from his new book to fit with the music.
“Michael’s voice has so much depth and character and I love his eye-rolling, withering view of the world,” Steve reveals. “The subject matter seemed to glue itself effortlessly to the music as if we’d been together writing in a studio working towards some grand concept.”
The results are nothing short of sensational, with the music ranging from the euphoric post-rock of Vespertina (which features Steve’s bandmate Loz Colbert on drums), to the propulsive dystopian electronica of Glitches; the weird psychedelic dub of Chaldean Oracle to the haunting Boards of Canada-esque ambience of In a Wonderland, which features Michael’s five-year-old son reading a Lewis Carroll poem as a kind of “chorus.”
Throughout, Michael’s beautifully crafted words compel and beguile, his thoughts on moving away from London to a seaside retreat and the anxiety of returning to the capital and his old Soho haunts again, musing on what London had become while he was away. “We’ve sleepwalked into the wrong England, so new it looks like the future, a future no one wants: it looks like the end of the world…”
1 Vespertina
2 Glitches
3 Chaldean Oracle
4 In A Wonderland
Released October 2022
Words by Michael Smith
Music written and recorded at home by Steve Queralt
All instruments played by Steve Queralt except drums on Vespertina by Laurence Colbert
