All India Radio is one Martin Kennedy. He makes music that is, for lack of any better description, electronic music. That said, what's on his latest album, The Slow Light, out today, is closer to the stuff that Eno and his cohorts produced a few decades ago. That music is instrumental doesn't make it electronica, or new age even if those genres are nearly touched on here.
There is treated piano on "Dark Star" which made me think of some earlier superb Harold Budd albums, and the vocals on "Galaxy of Light" -- Kennedy's daughter, I think? -- recall nothing so much as The Moon And The Melodies, the excellent collaboration between the already-mentioned Budd and the members of Cocteau Twins. "Redshift", meanwhile, has a touch of what sounds like a jazzy soundtrack from the Seventies percolating in the background, while album opener "Blueshift" is spacious sonic experimentation that is very nearly Moby-like in terms of accessibility.
The tunes on The Slow Light are pretty good examples of how to do this sort of music. Rather than get bogged down in the trappings of dance music, or stuttering electronica, Kennedy has on this All India Radio release made instrumental music that feels human and which remains poised somewhere between 1980's Eno and Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
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