And, wake up.
Rub the remnants of sleep from your eyes, blurry in the house lights and crisp at their edges with green-yellow grit born of indulgent R.E.M. immersion. Pick yourself up from where you fell, all of thirty minutes ago, lulled into tripping face-forward into a blackest hole of immeasurable depth; where it goes, only you now know; the descent, soundtracked by widescreen dreamadelica only the price on the door can buy: Daníel Ágúst.
The former GusGus front man has taken his time to get even this far: a debut album, released this very day. We know so because he tells us so, one of the few times he approaches the microphone with no intention of opening his being’s innermost hiding places for all to hear – the bearded dragons that dart from within coil and collide about us, the fantasies and ever mystifying facets of the dream becoming some kind of muddled reality in a corner of north London. Flanked by but two musicians – one keyboard player, one cellist – Ágúst spins yarns to potential sleeping beauties; all that’s required is for us to bend, so slightly, and prick our fingers on his sharpened pop symphonies.
His attire ensures he blends with ease into the night about us, into the very blackness that encroaches at the corners of our dream – a leather jacket hangs tight against his frame, leaving his thighs only when he spins like a child’s top, like a leprechaun doing laps around a pot o’ gold. His treasure is something more precious than metal, though: seduced by the grand arrangements that come partly courtesy of a backing tape but more obviously from the assembled cast of few, we willingly offer ourselves into the experience, into the world he so effortlessly brings to life. Monitors are erected beside him, grand landscapes giving way to strange cookery classes, each image either beguilingly surreal or stunningly sublime. The songs from his record, Swallowed A Star, have names, but names here serve little purpose – this set is some sort of lullaby, designed to pacify, to calm, to coax into thought, to have one wandering through their own synapses like an spyglass-toting gentleman in exploration’s golden age. Whole continents are here, if you can see beyond the murk; through the darkness that threatens these borders, to the sea, beyond the ocean, over these horizons so expansive. This is music of discovery, of adventure – that Ágúst’s album was originally planned as a three-piece set – one to appeal to dance music fans, another followers of pop and the third admirers of all things deemed classical – comes as no surprise whatsoever. Each and every song here could be reinvented, remoulded into something so very different; that’s their true beauty, however sweet the waltzing piano and cello accompaniment is.
A polite bow, and two, and three; a pirouette and a muted thank you: exit stage right. Or is it left from his point of view? Slumber – or something like it – recedes again, until we’re home. Ágúst comes to the bar. Shakes hands. Offers thanks. Thanks for coming.
Coming was one thing; precisely where we went while we were here, something altogether else.
