Fingerpop – What’s More Pretentious Than A Sunset
When do collaborative playlists ever lead to anything remotely productive? Friend meets friend, they talk about music, before heading home, then it’s, “Hey, let’s make a playlist”. For about 24 hours the collaboration excites both parties, but after the brief honeymoon period, one participant always gives up, leaving the other to continue plugging away, adding song after song to the bottomless pit of music never to be explored again. Embarrassing.
Fingerpop, the experimental synth and sample-driven project of Louise Mason and William Reid, may have begun with this kind of music-sharing hangout, but this collaboration has actually gone somewhere. This first record, titled What’s More Pretentious Than A Sunset, aims to reject any form of repetition which we tend to find everywhere in pop music and our day-to-day lives. The identity of Fingerpop is designed to rest on the fringes of society, and this record definitely challenges the listener to think about sound and music in a totally new, refreshing way.
The debut possesses all the ambition of Brian Eno and David Byrne‘s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, only without the unintended but nevertheless problematic blasphemy towards the Islamic faith (a niche reference, feel free to Google…) Let’s hope Mason and Reid’s promisingly avant-garde debut isn’t itself haunted by half a century of sampling lawsuits, unlike Eno and Byrne’s
Having said that, I think it’s safe to assume that, the way things are going with the climate, by 2073 we’ll have bigger issues than sample plagiarism. Of course, excessive vinyl purchasing habits aren’t going to make saving the planet any easier, but here’s the bottom line of this review: if and when Fingerpop decide to put wax to press, I want a copy, maybe two.
