Londoner Daniel O’Sullivan seems to pop in and out of the scene in recent years. He made a studio and a live album in 2011 and a few other collaborations (under the Laniakea pseudonym or as a member of bands like Grumbling Fur and Ulver, among others) in the meantime, but then nothing was heard from him until this year and his latest release Veld. And what a release it is!
Listeners longing for new vocal Eno album, or re-appearance of Talk Talk, or those that remember the remarkable Home album by Peter Broderick from a few years back. Should go and search out Veld. It is the kind of music you can freely label as space pop - light and dark tones switching intermittently, spaced-out male/female harmonies and layered acoustic and electronic instrumentation that recreates atmosphere more than anything else.
Veld is actually inspired by a Ray Bradbury story from “way back” in 1950 (The Veldt), in which the famous science fiction writer warned about the dangers of immersion in virtual reality. Certainly a theme that rings a bell in these, more modern times.
The music is so well structured and nuanced that it is no wonder that O’Sullivan has been working on the idea behind it and the music itself from 2010 up to last year. Musically, you can hear the inspirational elements from pop to modern classical music, and O’Sullivan has worked with a few of them, like Charlemagne Palestine, but also traces of drone and space rock (try The Many Are We). He has direct experience there too, for, along with Norwegians Ulver he did play with Sun 0))) too.
So this journey through modern classics, drone, electronics, gentle acoustics (Doe A Deer), have a meeting point in Eno-like pop (try HC SVNT DRACONES) which O’Sullivan himself sees as a great meeting point for incorporating all these various musical ideas.
In the end, what we have here is a melting pot of musical ideas which create a varying spaced out collage that never loses its (relaxed) intensity and focus. A great listen.
