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Van Allen
The Physical Science
Ancient Raven - 2021
Michael Panontin
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Jonas Scott has certainly kept himself occupied in 2021, issuing three EP-length records as Van Allen in the first half of the year and then this ten-track cassette just in time for New Year's.
"It's been a busy year of writing and conceptualizing ideas," Scott writes in a recent email. "I enjoy painting, drawing and writing poetry in the summers, and start to conceptualize those ideas sometime in the fall going into winters." Winters, for those international readers, take place in the town of Gimli, Manitoba, "a strong fishing community off the shores of Lake Winnipeg", Scott points out. The tiny town is also home to the new Iceland Heritage Museum - its first European settlers came over from Iceland in the late 1800s - as well as the recently formed Ancient Raven label.
The Physical Science is a decidedly urbane affair, with polished club beats, sexy slow jams and even the occasional burst of electronic experimentation, hardly what you would expect from such a rustic-looking place as Gimli (google it and take a tour for yourself). Fans with a hankering for 80s club sounds will find plenty to groove to, especially tracks like 'Real Life Dream Catcher' and 'Movie Playing in a Spanish Motel Room', the former with its sultry vocal and the latter with its novel cache of retro synths. But the real gems here are the two brief but adventurous snippets, 'Call of the Wild (Act 1/Scene 3)' and 'Call of the Wild (Final Act)', that close out sides A and B respectively, where Scot manages to coax some pretty swell Frippertronic-like sounds from an old Keytar synth.
Cratediggers of a certain bent may also want to check out Ancient Raven's recent reissue of little-known Icelandic-Canadian singer-songwriter Sol Sigurdson's 1974 LP The Lake Winnipeg Fisherman (with proceeds from the vinyl release fittingly going to the New Iceland Heritage Museum, one of the few places you can buy Sigurdson's music on CD).
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