Artist: Remote Viewers (The)

Date of Release: 20/10/2010

Catalogue no: RV8

Label: RV

Price: £10

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Track Listing

With their 9th release The Remote Viewers unveil a
radically different sound. Recorded live in one studio session, with the
rhythm section of John Edwards & Mark Sanders, this recording
is a document of a band coming out of transition and rediscovering a
group voice, to interpret the unique compositions of David Petts.

Reviews

01/04/0011 Brian Morton, The Wire

The Remote Viewers emerged out of B Shops For The Poor and established a line in haunting avant swing. Now absent the voice and alto saxophone of Louise Petts, and minus much of the electronic soundscaping of the first few albums for Leo, the group now stands as a saxophone quartet-plus-rhythm, with Caroline Kraabel and Sue Lynch joining founders David Petts and Adrian Northover in the front line, with John Edwards and Mark Sanders (and a little marimba from Rosa Lynch-Northover) providing the grid references. The retro styling is still in place, and as ever to a 1930s that is already postmodern - the decade of Elizabeth Bowen (whose novel To The North is referenced on the mock-Penguin cover), JB Priestley, Rex Warner and Edward Upward. The music has a strange, spectral surge and ebb, anxious and indeterminate. It replicates a journey traced on a pre-war, sun-faded Ordnance Survey map, dotted with blanks and no-go areas, but super-rich in instrumental detail.