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OUT NOW on Lost Toys editions: Electroacoustic chanteur Ricky Leach delivers his curiously haunting second album Yonic Totem through Lost Toys Records. The album perversely delves into our long held fascination with the apocalypse. From the Enlightenment to the climate crisis, an enormous shift has occured in humanity’s relationship to its future. Concieved as a return to a Black Death era public conciousness, this is ruminated upon through imaginatively processed musical forms and mordant lyrics. Inspired by Matmos' sampling of sound sources with powerful semantic resonances, Yonic Totem's approach is more acousmatic than electronic: Sounds are melted into one another with the listener swimming between them, mediated through antique musical instruments in hauntological reverie. The language of electronics feeds its way back into the acoustic - performances are attenuated physically with obstructions like balloons and hoses. The lyrical content is stark but vibrant with compelling images deployed somewhere between doomsaying preaching and light entertainment. The hysterical warnings and supernatural fantasies of traditional myths are made into oblique narratives: Scott Walker's The Seventh Seal is reimagined with a cyclical reference to the Swedish church paintings that originally inspired Ingmar Bergman's film. Whilst studio conventions are aborted in favour of an industrial, lo fi aesthetic, it is a sophisticatedly crafted production by Lost Toy's own Johnny Parry. Collaboration also comes from illustrator Rose Harries and Lost Toys' resident artist Andy Holden for the artwork on the sleeve. Accordianist Jules Banghert also makes an appearance between his duties in 90s gypsy pop cross-dressers Django Spears. Ricky's First 3" DVD album, "Doesn't Like You", out on Holmbush records, is now also stocked in the Lost Toys Shop. Limited Edition and only a few left, very different from 'Yonic Totem', it is a funny and funky set of tracks each with it's own specially made film by Ricky, including the what should have been hit single "life is just a series of hopeless disappointments", and the nearly was dance-floor filler, "what is this music doing to my body". Ricky Leach MySpace Video: |
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