Review | “Melancholy Melodies & Stolen Memories” (& more) by Sunshine Playroom / Proserpine
Discovering the mesmerizing psychedelic ready-mades of yet another hauntological genius
Based in Leeds, UK, Greg Wye releases under various aliases, mainly Sunshine Playroom and Proserpine, as well as Persephonic Sprawl and others.
He's also an audio mastering engineer, offering services as Persephonic Audio, a technical mastery that matters in the context of this album review since his compositional style as a musician is highly influenced by the processes of recording music.
The unavoidable impact of methods chosen, equipment used, and practices implemented while capturing and creating sounds becomes a sonic identity in itself for the music of Greg Wye, a process-derived template for composing whose origins expand our understanding of how music is structured, scripted, intentional, and formulated.
Specifically in the music of Sunshine Playground, this consciously methodological discipline is applied to genres of a lower register and minor volume, an overlap of inherited traditions hovering in the intersection of a Venn Diagram delineated by the Ambient and Folk genres.
It's music produced essentially by the juxtaposition of ready-made sound and artificial sonic constructions, complimenting each other like an image is enhanced by language, or in ever broader terms, music whose preoccupation is the complicity of the environmental to the synthetic, the organic to the artificial, the locality to transcendence.
The opposition of these inherently interconnected perceptual regimes is traditionally revealed within the sensory fusion and excessive abandon proposed by the psychedelic praxis and aesthetic, as understood in the specific aesthetic context of the lysergically-enhanced late '60s, a mid-century artistic movement whose formal concerns were ultimately an inflection of the baroque, pre-classical music ethos, a brew of antique tropes based on the concurrent and reciprocal outcomes achieved by multiple fugues interacting with relentless repetition, the heady passion of this undulating coupling circumscribed by the modest phrasing of guitars or other solo instruments improvising haltingly along the ongoing pulsations provided by the resonant background.
This formally austere (yet oddly fecund) musical structure is inherently achieved by the tense balance created by the layering of minimalism over opulence, and while it is a decidedly Western idiom, it simultaneously echoes the ceremonial hums, tonal mandalas and reverberating mantras that vibrate and echo under the trance-inducing swirls of virtuosic solos characteristic of Southeast and Far Eastern music (usually played by sitar, tabla, koto or other string instruments, but also by flutes and horns, here sometimes substituted by synth licks and hooks).
According to the liner notes, “Melancholy Melodies & Stolen Memories”, released in 2024, was produced using mainly just a MicroKorg synthesizer, with a Korg Volca Drum, some drum break samples, and cut-up sample snippets of dialogue from vintage TV programs, radio shows, and either live or second-hand field-recordings from nature documentary soundtracks.
Thematically, the album is announced as a nostalgic journey through childhood memories, unveiling a complex blend of emotions—a sunny yet melancholic reflection on bygone days, defined as the idyllic summers of the late 70s/early 80s, existing solely within the imperfect confines of memory, which serves as a portal to this cherished past.
Playful and evocative, the record sounds as if we are listening to a home tape capturing the entire sonic environment in the living room of a synth enthusiast, while they are experimenting with early analog gear in some imaginary UK suburb of the mid-'70s.
The TV and/or radio occasionally intrude in this discovery process with fragments of overheard dialogue, sometimes casual, other times scripted. Nature also features, with sounds of birdsong and other field recordings filling in the blanks with sketches of a tame, suburban, garden environment.
Retaining an abstract focus, the charming musicality of this album is not ambitious in terms of melodic structure or bold compositions but irresistibly offers a wide-ranging variety of catchy ear-candy made out of factory-preset sound settings, or other prefabricated sources, such as the warm chords of time-delayed pads and other musical shorthand designed to formulate compositional structure.
Sometimes, all of these faux-naif ornamental gestures decorate an even more simple yet also quite effective backbone made of taut basslines, sampled breaks, ready-made disco beats and cartoonish sounds effects.
It's an accumulation of found objects, almost a Duchampian statement about son trouvé, sonic ready-mades, placed together in arrangements that highlight their continuities through their juxtaposition, their pairing becoming a tense system of association via transferred familiarity, achieving if not the sublimity of the classical, then conquering the misty forts of memory.
It's a sensibility that is born in a world of regional buses rather than fiction about spaceships, an imagination cultivated in recreational parks and informed by educational PSAs, more akin to the imagination of a solitary child entertaining themselves in a suburban playground rather than the storytelling ambition of a world-building visionary, not boasting epic vistas of hallucinatory universes, but boldly proposing a discourse about the conquests of timidity, inventing an alternative timeline discovered in parochial charm rather than the otherworldly awe found in alternative universes. The eeriness of the sound comes from inside the house.
The liner notes mention “constructed nostalgia”, a musical niche that is not only improbably becoming a major genre with quite a few representatives and beautiful releases but seems to indefinitely extend the early '00s hauntological trend in all its variations, from purely electronic to strictly acoustic.
"Why not join us on this sentimental journey and renew some old, and perhaps some new memories?" asks Wye, continuing the nostalgic thematic from his altogether quite different previous album, the far more subtle and organic, though no less charming and seductive, debut "The Old Railway Track", again as Sunshine Playroom, released in September 2023.
Again paraphrasing the artist, the narrative illustrated by the music is a journey back into childhood memories, a trip that unveils a mix of emotions—a bittersweet reflection on carefree summer days gone by, only to be found in memory's imperfect grasp.
Using simple musical techniques like arpeggios and symphonic harmonies, the sound is mostly produced by traditional instruments – guitars, trumpets, flutes, persistent bass lines - whose delicate timbre is further softened, expanded, and treated with generously applied studio effects of a similarly modest nature, like echo and reverb, an austere yet heady style perhaps borrowed from the dub plates popularized by the Jamaican diaspora and often heard on sound systems around England.
These cross-cultural references are clues towards the realization that however simply achieved, the musical ethos is not straightforward, and neither are the arrangements simple: this is complicated music, made by a sophisticated artist, whose scope is much broader and his reach much deeper than the surface prettiness of his sound allows.
Rather than a treatise of limited scope, satisfied to layer smooth folk stylings with ambient sound effects, the album unfolds as a sonic feast bursting with inventiveness, its pulchritude decidedly and seductively shimmering with ornate embellishments of baroque pop ambition.
Hazy horn sections, jangling guitar licks, tinkling keys, atmospheric field recordings humorously intercepted by the sputtering of mopeds teasing the afternoon lull of a parochial side street, this is soulful music serenading us with the placid contentment of an imaginary suburban idyll: the universal signifiers of splendid isolation and introverted bliss are all faithfully and thoroughly invoked, by aligning qualities like lightness and gentleness with an impeccable taste in musical aesthetics and a witty commentary on the evolution of genres.
One of the sampled dialogue snippets asks, “Hello, have you ever listened to the noises things around you make?”, then proceeds to unfurl an orientalist sarabande featuring the kind of soft-focus tabla and choral lullaby one would expect as an interlude in some soundtrack of an Anna Biller movie: the hyper-stylized spirit of the late 1960's is dazzlingly refracted through a contemporary filter, a digital gloss heightening the original reference, adding a picturesque, mannered glow to the hallucinatory original.
Synths are not absent, sometimes juxtaposed with directly illustrative samples such as the sound of a train clicking over high-velocity railway tracks, their accumulation sounding like a home-made and wholesome version of Autobahn, especially when corseted with arpeggiated synth lines and sparsely studded with staccato electro beats, as if the Kraftwerk classic has been stripped of its Teutonic froideur and repurposed to fit a less technically and aesthetically advanced British Railways setting.
Charmingly, the musical mood remains blissful throughout, flowing along an almost Arcadian, folksy optimism, inspiring more a sense of sweetly-remembered recollections than the moodiness of rueful reminiscence.
Ornate production, resonating expansiveness of orchestration, and an overall voluptuousness of intent all are erudite factors that remind the listener of the early '80s sound of pop revisionists like the Fantastic Something, Felt, Durutti Column, early Pale Fountains, mid-career Talk Talk, among others.
Occasionally veering off towards the conservatoire arrangements directly quoted from pre-classical chamber music by the masters of psychedelic pop like George Martin or even the Zombies, Wye exists in the same school of intricate, lush and elaborate meta-pop music, elaborating on the mid-'60s efflorescence of baroque pop exemplified by the Beach Boys, Procol Harum and Love, an aesthetic universe last revisited briefly but irresistibly in the '90s by such obscure revivalists as the High Llamas and the Ladybug Transistor.
Occasional synth-pop blasts are succeeded by lyrical confections of pastoral bliss featuring birdsong, spacey synth washes, and highly treated choral background vocals.
Following are a few words about previous releases by Wye, all of them worth a listen:
Released under the moniker Proserpine, "Prescription for acute sleep deprivation” is a three-track EP of dreamy psychedelic instrumentals, whose swirling guitar loops and cosmic synth effects combine their shimmering tones in a progressively more intricate juxtaposition and reciprocity, their synergy an alchemical reaction that augments unilaterally their respective psychoacoustic tension, eventually culminating in the sublime final track, which features a plaintive yet tender French horn solo, a jewel of melodic wonder whose emotional semi-improvised over the most gentle of acoustic strumming echoes.
Finally, the “Cheesy but Tasty” EP, first released back in 2003 and ripe for rediscovery, is a bright collection of seven mid-tempo percussive tracks, including some beautiful dub workouts, adorned with old-school horn sections, strumming guitars, spacey organs, and quirky synth effects.
The overall feeling is bouncy and playful, its lightness held aloft by simple riffs and taut basslines, their summery vibe conjuring the gentle lilt and relaxed groove of Caribbean or even Balearic island music.
Optimistic even if contemplative, lyrical as well as Dionysian, the music of Sunshine Playroom AKA Greg Wye is a pleasure to be discovered and widely appreciated for what it is: a thing of beauty.
Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, April 2024