AT a dark club in east London last weekend I walked into Optimos latest London party to find a room full of bank holiday clubbers bathed in a transmission of beatless, meditative drones and crackles. The piece remained constant and unchanging for 10 minutes or more, and people seemed to love whatever it was, despite the incongruously ravey setting of a Wapping warehouse in the middle of a seemingly endless weekend of electronic music. It was a highly unusual thing to hear in that setting, but then Optimo are highly adept at making people type those words, and I carried on with my night without asking about the source.

The next day I was talking to Lewis Cook of the Glasgow synth-pop/kosmische duo Happy Meals about he and his musical partner and girlfriend Suzanne Roddens new album for the So Low label, Full Ashram Devotional Ceremony Vol IV-V. He said with delight that hed heard second-hand on Facebook that the whole album had been played from start to finish in a club in London the previous evening, and we both laughed as I belatedly twigged that Id been there. I think its funny and wonderful to think of all these people being out and ready to party and then this entire record, which is heavily rooted in spirituality and meditation and has an opening track that is just long tone drone, gets played in full.

Spirituality and philosophy have often been fraught territory for musicians, but Cook has studied widely and is the precise opposite of the fortnight-in-Goa Britpop poseur of yore. (He also has the look of a terrifyingly handsome, terrifyingly persuasive California shaman to him that really couldnt be carried off without extensive background knowledge to back it up.) Though he was just back from an exhausting five-week European tour with his other band, The Cosmic Dead, when I talked with him, Cook mapped out Happy Meals vision for the record with clarity and enthusiasm, and his knowledge and ideas always impressive when Ive spoken to him on other topics were, as ever, well worth considering in full.

The reason theres a spirituality in the record is that theres a sad tendency to reject spirituality in the modern world, he begins. It has become associated with institutionalised religions that have been so confining and had such negative effects on people. But in another way we accept a lot of dogmas take the dogma of austerity for example and tend to accept that they are just the way things should be. I think by parodying that a bit we can take it to an extreme and maybe de-program it a bit.

The main idea of the record is the need to push things forward, he continues, and to look at the future as something that might be good. That idea of futurism is quite rare people usually think of future as big glass high-rise buildings and things like that. The record is about trying to recapture a sense of positivity about the future the kind of thing you saw in TV programmes in the 1960s. Its not necessarily about repeating those things musically or aesthetically were not in the 1960s any more but rather about trying to project a vision of that into music and trying to capture it as a concept. Thats what the album is basically: an artistic vision of that world.

Utopianism crops up a lot in Cooks ideas for the record too, and he is at pains to properly contextualise the idea as they wish to explore it. Utopianism is kind of a dirty word and I use it slightly tongue in cheek, he says. You cant be too prescriptive about this stuff and how its done. I think were entering a world in which technology allows us to be less prescriptive with these worlds, and were not necessarily limited in that now by scarcity of resources. For example, vinyl is a limited commodity, but I was able to send you our new record today, and it didnt cost either of us anything. Theres something almost utopian about that, but I dont think its been fully harnessed yet, its sitting in the system somewhere. Music offers one example of a new world, and music can lead into a playful meditation on utopianism.

These things arent necessarily liberating by default, though, he continues. They require a vision to actually reinterpret some of the things we take for granted, and also some of the things we see as a pain in the arse. If you look at Charlie Brookers Black Mirror, for example, it continuously characterises technology as this total pain that will make everything terrible.

It quite possibly could do that, but as much as that might actually turn out to be the case, the job of an artist now is to reclaim a vision of the future. Our projection on the record is pretty obtuse its not a point-by-point manifesto on how to do it but it is an attempt to encourage people to begin to think of new ways to engage with technology, to imagine a future not necessarily dictated by technology and not dictated by the current political and social hegemony.

Black Mirror comes up in an interesting way again a little later as Cook goes further into his desire to promote a positive vision of the future rather than a bleak, dystopian one. A lot of electronic music these days, by James Ferraro and Holly Herndon and the like, is quite negative and bleak. I really love those records but to me their take on the future sounds a bit like the Black Mirror of music a kind of parody of humanity extrapolated to an incredibly bleak point. Thats an influence too though, because I love these records, but I come away feeling like I want to take something else out of them.

This sounds like Im setting the record up to be this huge manifesto, he laughs, suddenly checking himself, possibly concerned (unjustifiably, I should add) that he might be tumbling down a philosophical rabbit hole.

Its not supposed to be that at all though, its a just small gesture towards a larger idea and its not our ideas necessarily. The writer Mark Fisher has been a big influence his book Inventing The Future was really inspiring to me. I wrote my dissertation on how progress doesnt exist and how technology is creating the potential for disaster. I really believed that at the time but that book, while it doesnt invalidate that idea, points out that its just a way of looking at things rather than solid facts.

How we engage with the concept of the future can change the way we look at things, and this record is our effort to put as positive a spin on that as possible.

Happy Meals Full Ashram Devotional Ceremony Vol IV-V is out on June 17 on So Low. Happy Melas play live at the Glasgow School of Art degree show on June 9 and the Iona festival on July 1

See original here:

Music: Happy Meals serve up their new album Full Ashram Devotional Ceremony Vol IV-V - The National