The Eighties are an enduringly popular revival theme in music. Even the Nineties can’t completely replace it. Some of the achievements of the decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall are still having a hard time of it today. One of them is the guitar synthesiser. For British producer and multi-instrumentalist Will Yates, aka Memotone, it is this underrated instrument that now has a permanent place on his album »How Was Your Life«, which is characterised by an amiable, unsettling free spirit. Memotone’s music is often referred to as ambient, but you could just as easily call it weird electronic folk or intelligent drug music.
Amiably unsettling, it comes across at first as warm, harmonious and, for the most part, harmless. As each piece progresses, it moves from one unexpected idea to the next, with an uninhibited delight in combining seemingly unrelated sounds. At the start of »Paradise Drips«, for example, the gently shimmering guitar synths slowly glide towards the sky, enriched by ethnic-sounding percussion and a kind of faux field recording. In case of Memotone, acoustic and electronic things naturally accompany, compete and mix with each other. You can’t really know how life is going to turn out anyway. This is exactly the feeling that resonates through this album.
How Was Your Life
