(05.25.05) The great thing about vinyl is how it fills a room, how a record seems
to inhale slowly before letting loose with that first note. Vinyl
just oozes into a space and Multicast’s Bahian Coastal Hwy
(offered exclusively on this old school of formats) flows out from
your speakers with a lush, tropical sound. Multicast builds rich
tapestries with their intricate and delicate guitar melodies, their
sensuous bass rhythms that tap like a lover’s thumb against the base
of your spine and their percussion that mimics the sounds of birds and
insects deep in the verdant jungles.
Oh, yes, it’s a record to smoke a fat one too. “Now then, if you’d
care to sample this,” a voice says in the intro of “Underdub,” “I
think you’ll be charmed with its effects. You may find it slightly
reminiscent of cucumber; a characteristic I’m unable to account for at
the moment, but it’s not bad at all.” Oh, definitely. As the
skittering percussion lays down a foundation for a guitar to spill
warm sunlight across, you will find it very easy to lie back and puff
puff puff your way to a melodious nirvana.
“Arrival” is filled with longing as a melancholic guitar finds its way
across an empty heath. Its company is a lonely wind of fading choral
notes and a series of bubbling modular synth phrases that rise up like
neglected spirits and vanish in the purely tonal sky. A left-field
electronic pop melody winds its way through curtains of shimmering
static in “The Only Thing I Adore,” setting the stage for the frail
vocodered voice that lays bear its heart.
Tribal percussion kicks off the flip side of the record. “Pucuna”
approaches a frenetic drum circle in the same way that “Bahian Coastal
Hwy” (the record’s opening track) dealt with the heady romance of
Brazilian dance music: by building austere arrangements in which
echoes grow. Multicast believes that silence is a vitally important
instrument, and doesn’t feel the need to layer so much texture and
overdubs onto a track that you can’t hear the reverberation of your
heartbeat as it thrills to the delicate instrumentation it is feeling.
“Departure” loops through a revving cycle, attenuating and diminishing
its range of electronic arcs to give off a semblance of a spinning
whirlwind; “Ansico” unspools into the infinite horizon with a
lap-steel guitar and a bright synth accompaniment while a bassline
rumbles beneath, providing propulsion and impetus to the light
percussion. As with the rest of Bahian Coastal Hwy, “Ansico”
is filled with rich elusive cinematics — widescreen canvases painted
with fleet brushes and delicate daubs of sound. Multicast is the
reason I still have a turntable and Bahian Coastal Hwy is this
summer’s reason to knock the dust off yours.
Bahian Coastal Hwy is out now on Obliq Recordings as a 12″ release and available soon as MP3 download via Ear-Rational.
