The Beat Surrender

This is what you would get if you give the church mice in Bagpuss, a broken piano, a battered acoustic guitar once owned by Django Reinhardt and a drum kit made of magic beans, and then encouraged them to consume a kilogram of potent Wensleydale cheese spiked with morphine, whilst showing them a crumpled photograph of the late Salvador Dali wearing pink oven gloves and holding a leaking watering can…

Yes it’s just another day at the Surreal Office, with Ollie Ralfe and his mad music brain, this time he’s used his organ to compose a soundtrack to an impending, new, mighty boosh-esque big screen escapade apparently called ‘Bunny and the Bull’, the contents of which are as yet unseen, but in the mean time here’s a whole album of Noel Fielding endorsed soundtrackery.

Unlike a lot of filmic soundscapes, many of which appear random and infuriatingly inconsistent, these tracks have a unity of purpose and hold together really well as a listening experience, comprising of 22 tracks, predominantly instrumental, which take in skeletal waltzes with curiously haunting melodies, and lonely piano pieces that sound at once ethereal and childlike, it’s like a woozy trip on a lysergic waltzer.

Take ‘Museum’ for example it sounds like a cross between an early Frank Zappa orchestral composition and the much lauded Granddaddy, ‘Atlantis Rising’ on the other hand sounds like a rave up in a Morrocan brothel whilst ‘Attics’ sounds like a rave up in a Turkish brothel. Yes, there’s all sorts of intriguing tunage going on here which all makes for a very diverting and original soundtrack.

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