Reports of the demise of All India Radio have clearly been exaggerated with the various hints coming from All India Radio’s main presenter Martin Kennedy that fresh work was on the way, and today we are honoured to turn the dial to the video for the first single, ‘Catch The Breeze’, off the forthcoming album ‘The Unified Field’ which will be hitting the airwaves in September.
‘Catch The Breeze’ is a cover of the 1991 track from the mighty Slowdive, and Kennedy explains why this was chosen as All India Radio’s comeback single:
From the late 1980s to the early 90s, I lived and breathed UK shoegaze music. My band at the time was starting to get serious, and I desperately wanted that sound, particularly Slowdive’s ‘Catch The Breeze’, which for me melded ambient music, which I also loved, so perfectly with the melodic fuzzed-out bliss of shoegaze. It didn’t work out that way with my band, and only recently I asked myself – should I recreate one of my all-time favourite shoegaze songs? Why the heck not!
And we indeed are the beneficiaries of this with, All India Radio taking an already immersive and achingly beautiful song and making it even more dreamy: creating a sonic landscape that positively shimmers through the speakers and wraps itself around you in an embracing, comforting hug.
The delivery is enhanced by the glorious, ethereal vocals of Lisa Gibbs (USER, The Same Same, greenhouse) which floats across the ether above a muscular, rolling bass and the trademark crystalline layers of shimmering sound that All India Radio is known for. This version is airy and ethereal, with a psychedelic fugue and a kaleidoscope of coloured tones punctuated by the arpeggiated guitars and synth drone. The result is something that is a vivid fusion of Pink Floyd with indie shoegaze and Sigur Rós: a luminescent glowing animated dreamscape, hypnotic and mesmerising.
The track comes with a hazy enigmatic video directed by Kennedy and featuring Gibbs in an appropriately psychedelic fugue: she has a haunting presence throughout the video like a ghost singing from the ether:
This is glorious stuff. The video for ‘Catch The Breeze’ is out tomorrow (1 May) and the track is currently available via all the usual sites and through the link below:
All India Radio are essentially Kennedy and Mark Wendt on bass.
Kennedy is a prolific creator – witness in just the past couple of years the release of three albums with The Church’s Steve Kilbey (‘Jupiter 13’, ‘The Strange Life of Persephone Nimbus’ and ‘Premonition K’) as well collaborations with Gareth Koch (‘Music In The Afterlife’) as well as All India Radio releases and his heavy metal project Observers. He works to a strict timetable – mirroring the discipline shown by Nick Cave – keeping office hours to write and record utilising his Pro Tools software and Apple computer, and composing mostly on a Martin acoustic guitar, his preferred instrument. Read my 2023 interview with him here.
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