Trip. A simple arrangement of four letters that has many associations: a trip to the seaside, a drug trip (and so a journey into the unknown), a trip is to suddenly fall. “The Soft Bounce” is a trip album in the widest sense: containing nearly 45 minutes of carefully programmed music, it sets off into to the unknown, it contains pleasure and pain, doubt and transcendence, and it ends somewhere that is different from where you started.

Beginning with expansive synth washes and “Love To You Love Baby”-style oohs, “Delicious Light” is immediately uplifting: we’re off on a switchback journey that will pass from light through darkness and confusion and pain to transcendence and acceptance. Darkness of a sort is forged in explosive motion (“Iron Age”) before passing through sunshine pop (“Creation”), first wave UK psych (“Door To Tomorrow” with its invocation of Emily, beloved of both the Pink Floyd and the Piccadilly Line), and the blissful Balearic emotion of “Diagram Girl”. This passes into the American Gothic of “Black Crow” - that traditional avian harbinger of doom - and then we’re down the rabbit hole.

“Tomorrow, Forever” begins in the sound of nothingness and slowly unfolds into beatless cloud reveries that are at once solemn and hopeful. Weightless, blown with the wind, you come down to earth with the skipping afro beat of “The Soft Bounce”: a soft female voice pleads for connection, but she is almost swamped by the stinging, shocking guitar reverb. The positive moods of “Finally First” and “Triumph” put everything back together before the all-out acid assault of “Third Mynd”: from life to death to rebirth, ‘you throw the sticks up in the air, and they come down in a different pattern’.

Is it the history of human kind or a personal, individual odyssey? With guest appearances from Blaine Harrison (Mystery Jets), Euros Childs (Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci), Jane Weaver, Holly Miranda and Hannah Peel, Erol Alkan and Richard Norris have constructed an album that is both highly enjoyable and on a deeper level, perceptual and psychological. Growth is necessary, as is adaptation to change: neither are achieved easily or without some kind of sacrifice. Operating on a level that can be verbal but is more often non-verbal, music can ease that passage.

Jon Savage, March 2016.

The track listing of ‘The Soft Bounce’, available on CD, DL, LP and deluxe LP, is as follows:

1. Delicious Light
2. Iron Age
3. Creation
4. Door To Tomorrow
5. Diagram Girl
6. Black Crow
7. Tomorrow, Forever
8. The Soft Bounce
9. Finally First
10. Triumph
11. Third Mynd

The vinyl version of the album can be pre-ordered via the following link: http://go.phantasysound.co.uk/BTWSCollection and DL via http://geni.us/SoftBounceiTunes

The video to current single, Diagram Girl, has also just been unveiled. Directed by BAFTA winning director Kieran Evans, the video is the first in a series of films accompanying a number of the album tracks.

Talking about the video, Evans said:

I love the music that Beyond The Wizards Sleeve create and Re-Animate. I’ve been a fan since day one and have been lucky enough to have collaborated with them on the visuals for their incredible DJ sets over the years and the film to accompany ‘Diagram Girl’ draws on the influences of the French New Wave films, Surrealist cinema and the dream logic of Samuel Beckett.