Scott Tulloch hails from Edinburgh, the land of the Fringe. It’s not a place that’s alien to the new and the alternative so the artistic ambience of the city probably had something to do with Scott’s slant on electronic composition. The music of Scott Tulloch is not bad but it’s probably still en route to being really good. As a body of work it is still a work in progress. The foundations have been laid and the framework of potential has been erected but cladding and fitting out is still required to complete the edifice.
While it’s appreciated that this is the work of one man with his laptop there is a feeling that a little more is required. It’s an excellent achievement but to reach out to the masses and penetrate the vast cosmos of music that daily compounds the expanding universe of sound it could benefit itself from expansion and variegation.
One of the better tracks is ‘Heliopause’, which is actually a kind of boundary in space around the solar system. It’s a number that has quite a space-age feel and it builds nicely into an aural landscape evoking all things science fictional and space-ship. However, albeit that computerised technology is a wonderful beast and widely used to compose music, the danger is that machines without hearts can be allowed to make music without heart as well. The joy of being human is the unavoidable imperfection. Drum machines are flawed by a clinical precision that lacks the organic vitality of real hands holding real sticks and hitting real skins. The imperceptible carotid pulse of red blood corpuscles somehow adds the haemoglobin of warmth and life.
Such clinical effect is aggravated by the absence of vocals and ipso facto some of the tracks could possibly gain much by the addition of a voice. The music is bubbly and upbeat. Typical is something like ‘coffee’, a catchy number with a nice bit of funkiness about it. However a little shadow and cloud would lend respite to the endless sunshine. Cloudy skies are more interesting than blue skies.
It would be an absolute truth to say much of this stuff is either a soundtrack without a film or incidental music without the programme. Perhaps this is where Scott should concentrate his efforts but there is also the feeling that if he could produce another ‘Dark side of the moon’ he’d be more than happy. Coincidentally the sleeve image of a man frozen mid-dive into a swimming pool is very redolent of the work that Hipgnosis used to design, specifically for ‘Wish you were here’.
These are songs without words and instrumentals are inevitably open season for thinking up wacky titles. Hence one can only imagine what lateral stream of consciousness can come up with ‘I want to be a marine biologist’ when there are no words to give any such suggestion. There thus appears to be an underlying desire to be something cerebral and significant, but to realise this ambition will need a little more bite and a slightly darker edge. A piece like ‘Uppercut’ shows hints as it has a bit more beef and an interesting rhythm.
As mentioned earlier there are clear leanings towards use as visual accompaniment so it would be a rash person indeed who would deny the possibility that Scott might circumnavigate the tedium of trying to make it in the mainstream and one of his arrangements suddenly appearing on a Lloyds TSB advert. Watch and listen!
Review by Peter Heydon
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