Panel of Proles #2: Leafcutter John ~ Yes! Come parade with us

For the second episode of Panel of Proles, we roped in pretty much an entire band to sit on the review panel. It’s a cosmic take-over! And a great PROLE JAZZ honour to report the musings of drum beast Voidlord Gonzalez, void-koan jape fiend Captain Jack Avery and star-sword wielding songstress Celestial Broc on the metagalactic sounds of Leafcutter John‘s new album Yes! Come Parade With Us…

That time Leafcutter John forgot his plectrum

….listen!

Rico Voidlord Gonzalez: The first thing you need to know about Leafcutter John is that he is responsible for the visuals that grace Venetian Snares‘ 2003 album Chocolate Wheelchair. If this means nothing to you, google it immediately, I’ll wait here….

If you have heard this terrifying opus of electronic spine-melting befuddlement, then you might be surprised by the bouncy upbeat tone of Mr John’s latest release Yes! Come Parade With Us. There are occasional sonic resonances with the triumvirate of thinking person’s electronica (Venetian Snares, Aphex Twin and Squarepusher) but these are confined to haunting soundscapes rather than glitching attacks of computer generated polyrhythms.

Inspired by a sixty mile hike along the British coast, Yes! Come Parade With Us blends field recordings of seabirds and pub chatter, acoustic drums and a mixture of software and hardware put together at home with the help of the cat. If all of this doesn’t convince you, there was this one time I watched John home live sample a saxophone solo, then chop it up and play it back in real time using a PlayStation controller. That was jazz. I don’t know what this is, but it’s joyous and bouncy, and you should put it in your ears.

~ Favourite track: Pillar, it sounds like Kraftwerk

VoidLord plays drums for intergalactic miscreant disco-punks Captain Avery & the Cosmic Triceratops of Intergalactic Peace and is rumoured to cook a mean dish of scran from his space-kitchen lovingly known as ‘The Box’

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Celestial Broc: Today I received six colonies of leafcutter ants through the post. This is honestly true – they came from Trinidad. I listened to Yes! Come Parade With Us as I was unpacking them, building and escape-proofing their new houses around them, and setting them up with a replenishing food and water source. I forgot what I was doing as I was doing it. The marching basslines are exploratory. The animal sounds are enchanting. The Nintendo melodies are comforting. The punching tribal instrumentals are unnerving. The scattered chiming samples are hypnotic. The polyphonic synths are penetrating. The music is oxymoronic, it’s organic-electronic. The album is the most fantastically appropriate music to tend leafcutter ants to because it phases you out and switches you on at the same time. It induces a heady blend of everything you require to be efficient and effective at a task that requires skill and focus. I think you can probably also listen to it during other activities, but I encourage you to find that out for yourself. You might master a new skill, coached by Leafcutter John.

~ Favourite track: Pillar, because Gameboy

Celestial Broc is a megastar dee-jay with a particular love of electro-house and disco. In her spare time she fronts inimitable and quirksome synth-pop duo ShaSh and lends soulful vox to worldgaze psych-geeks Captain Avery & the Cosmic Triceratops of Intergalactic Peace. She tours UK festivals giving workshops revealing the mysterious dark art of entomology.

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Man has a Triceratops on his jumper!! RESPECT & LOVE!!

Captain Jack Avery: This is a collection of sonic bird sounds from distant planets. A meditation on empty fullness and full emptiness. This is future primitivism. It’s alien madness, a collective brain-soliloquy warble. It has an almost Animal Collective bounce; it’s the Knife without the underlying dread, it’s sedated, blissed-out Sonic the Hedgehog fugue music, the sounds inside your happy head as you stroll through a field where trees are kaleidoscope dragons and lysergic rainbow trails leave visual furrows through the viscous and beautiful air. I once heard this, in the future, made of quartz. Eating it only makes it better. Everything is fractal and unified. Thought is in flight. Dream harder! Impossible algorithms versus anti-gravity synths, who wins? Build castles of feathers. Can I give this 1,000 points?

~ Favourite track: Dunes, it sounds like the love cry of my first pet dinosaur

Jack is a Robotic Overlord piloting the Ship of Fools a.k.a. Cosmic Triceratops. He creates music in the song lab by hybridising the genetic material of small rebellious star clusters, and adding chanting and the odd yelp. In his spare time he composes nonsensical reviews for PROLE JAZZ and makes cups of tea for our ‘proper’ journalists