On December 25, 2022 Unquiet Music Ltd will release their second single, “I Do Remember The Feeling” – a new taste of their second album MEMEmusic.
Unquiet Music Ltd’s 2020 debut album, In the Name of… (A Prayer for our Times), was an arresting and hypnotic mix of contemporary classical structures, urgent solo and choral voices, and electric art-rock sonority. An abstracted electronic Mass, it merged Messaien-ic detail and depth with needle-like mechanistic precision and a hallucinatory atmosphere. Two years on, “I Do Remember The Feeling” illustrates the next step for Unquiet Music: avant-garde pop reflections on human connection and communication, more song-based and lyrical.
“I Do Remember The Feeling” vividly embodies this change in approach. An off-kilter love song, dancing complexity around simplicity in ever-broadening arcs, it merges twitchy narrative verses with romantic choruses full of ebullient strings, Caribbean trumpet and remembered jazz memes. Memories peppered with signature tunes but alive with their own nervy melodies. This time, imagine Mick Karn and Gentle Giant sitting in at a bustling Havana jazz club. Or perhaps Frank Zappa, but a Frank stripped entirely of his cynicism: dancing with a rose in his teeth and a wicked loving glint in his eye, but with his love of sudden musical shifts and roguish key jumps as intact as ever. All of this is put together with project leader JP Rossi’s usual attention to fine detail, classical rigour and urgent austerity… this time, though, with an excited romantic heart straining hard against his ribs.
There’s a true story behind it, too, drawn from JP’s own life:
“I was commissioned to make the music for a theater play. My future wife had the main role in it and it was the first time that I met her. The play was a strange one, traversing the history of mankind and promoting an idealistic "peace and love" mood. When I first visited the theatre, she was onstage in a fairy dress, holding a sword. Well, the sword was blade-down and she had her hands laying on it in front of her. We exchanged looks, and that was the start.
“Later on, we were having dinner at a restaurant called Chez Alcide and we started talking and exchanging. We realized that there was absolutely no limit to the depth of our exchanges other than that which we would put onto it ourselves - but neither of us stopped. That is the process of falling in love, I suppose. It's the one moment of absolute feeling in my life that I will always remember. It built me, if you like. It made me realize not just that I was in connection with one person but eventually, and by extension, with my species and beyond that. Forever.”
“I Do Remember The Feeling” comes with a bonus track, “Epidemics”, which displays Unquiet Music Ltd’s more familiar instrumental side. Hanging, tinkling percussion sounds give way to hither-and-yon pitched voices, whistles and drum beats – something which nudges at memories of Henry Cow; of the orchestral end of Rock in Opposition; of the Canterbury meanders; but which also keeps up Unquiet Music Ltd’s deeper connection with European and American avant-garde classical movements, reaching back into the twentieth century and forward into the twenty-first.
The single will be available to purchase on Bandcamp beginning on December 25.
