Rave tapes from Auld Reekie
Who?
Jordan Stanley is an experimental composer from Edinburgh and a producer with fingers in many Scottish pies. ‘A Cry For The Moon’ is his second album of pristine techno head-nodders and sees him move from cool London cassette label Salmon Universe to equally cool Dorset cassette label Bytes.
Why Jordan Stanley?
His luminous banging beats warrant comparisons with Rustie, Hudson Mohawke and Italian synth-whisperer Lorenzo Senni, as ‘A Cry For The Moon’ veers from wonky synth jams to effervescent broken rave. The highlight, ‘Pure Morning’, is a 4am techno boogie deluged with crepuscular scratches and cheekily hooting melodies. Look out for unintentional guest stars Charli XCX and Ariana Grande, thanks to Stanley’s devotion to highly tweaked sampling. “Many of the synth chords are made up of minuscule samples of existing songs which have been warped to the point that they are virtually unrecognisable,” he explains.
Tell Us More…
Jordan Russell-Hall, for that is his real name, has true musical pedigree. He’s strummed the guitar for boisterous Scottish folk band The Youth And Young, twiddled knobs for Britney Spears-covering trip hopper Dahlia, and tapped the glockenspiel for Glasgow’s “nostalgic synth miserablists” Dead Modern. But until now, Jordan Stanley was perhaps best-known for his ambient guise stanleystanley, which is a bit like Duran Duran being called, er, duranduran. His debut album as Jordan Stanley was ‘Empty For Hundred’, named after the Yamaha MT400 cassette recorder through which he dissected his music. Its follow-up, ‘A Cry For The Moon’, arrived hot on the heels of his first live performance supporting Joe Oxley’s psych rock outfit TVAM. If TVAM’s rise to critical acclaim is anything to go by, this Edinburgher and his hooting melodies will be around for some time.
‘A Cry For The Moon’ is out on Bytes
