‘Scintilli’ is Plaid’s first standalone album since 2003’s ’Spokes’, and it follows on so neatly that one could overlook just how busy Ed Handley and Andy Turner have been in the intervening years. The duo’s diverse soundtrack, audio-visual and musical collaborations have had no obvious influence on this new release, however.
In many ways, ‘Scintilli’ is a pleasant throw-back to Warp’s ‘Artificial Intelligence’ albums of the early 90s, when some neat marketing successfully introduced the notion of “armchair techno” to British record buyers. With its uniformly short tracks, tingling melodies and low frequency bass-lines, ‘Scintilli’ rewards the loyal fans Plaid won during this boom with a consistent suite of superficially immediate but elegant electronics, with deceptively complex depths.
The contributions of occasional guest vocalists to Plaid’s earlier albums have now been absorbed into the ever-flowing textures of ‘Scintilli’, leading to morphing, asexual sighs and whispers melting through tracks like ‘Missing’ and ‘Founded’ like treacle through ice cream.
Contrasting with the album’s more liquid moments, pieces like ‘Thank’ and ‘Upgrade’ fuse pinging synths, precision beat slaps and mutated bass into marvels of faithfully constructed classic techno.
‘35 Summers’ is ‘Scintilli’s most abstract and also prettiest moment – the sound of music box chimes thawing after a long winter, dripping note upon note into a deep green sound-pool, while surrounding leaves and ferns uncurl.
‘Unbank’ sees Handley and Turner outdo Orbital’s 2001 rendering of the ‘Doctor Who’ theme by reimagining the spirit of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s original through a fractured 70s lens of Chicory Tip rhythms and Human League synths (a close cousin to the League’s own ‘Tom Baker’, in fact).
‘Scintilli’s playful CD packaging turns the disc into an ornament, acknowledging the novelty element of physical releases in a download age. By sticking to unassuming, primary colour pleasures, Plaid’s music transcends this tongue-in-cheek disposability through an understanding of the plastic head-rush of imaginative pop forms.
-Stuart Huggett-
