Sun Moon Town

Steve Queralt, bass player of pioneering shoegazers RIDE, and the writer and film-maker MIchael Smith have joined forces for a stunning four-track EP, released on Bytes in October. Over Steve’s exceptional electronic soundscapes, Michael provides spoken-word vocals in his lulling Hartlepool tones, distilling excerpts from his new book to fit with the music. The duo were introduced by Joe Clay from Bytes during lockdown, when Steve revealed that he was looking for vocalists to work with on some music he was putting together. Joe had met Michael when he collaborated with the late, great Andrew Weatherall, who composed a soundtrack to accompany Michael reading melancholic musings from his 2013 novel, Unreal City. Joe felt that Michael could be the perfect foil for Steve and after an experiment on Vespertina, a track that had previously featured sample dialogue from Penélope Cruz, they realised they had something special and decided to work on a full release together - four tracks in the classic RIDE EP format. “Michael’s voice has so much depth and character and I love his eye-rolling, withering view of the world,” Steve reveals. “The subject matter seemed to glue itself effortlessly to the music as if we’d been together writing in a studio working towards some grand concept.” “Whatever Steve sent me just seemed to fit where my head was at,” Michael adds. “Slowly but surely, in those days when time seemed like a strange, amorphous smudge, the tracks emerged, with us working at a distance, sending them back and forth, refining them, getting them right.” The results are nothing short of sensational, with the music ranging from the euphoric post-rock of Vespertina (which features Steve’s bandmate Loz Colbert on drums), to the propulsive dystopian electronica of Glitches; the weird psychedelic dub of Chaldean Oracle to the haunting Boards of Canada-esque ambience of In a Wonderland, which features Michael’s five-year-old son reading a Lewis Carroll poem as a kind of “chorus”. For Steve, the EP represents finding his own voice musically away from the band he has been an integral part of for so many years. “It’s about being able to make decisions about sounds, direction and arrangements,” Steve explains. “Knowing how the final version will sound and having the final say without making compromises.” Throughout, Michael’s beautifully crafted words compel and beguile, his thoughts on moving away from London to a seaside retreat and the anxiety of returning to the capital and his old Soho haunts again, musing on what London had become while he was away. “We’ve sleepwalked into the wrong England, so new it looks like the future, a future no one wants: it looks like the end of the world…”