PRETTYGOODTIME

Elias Hovden, Wish You Would (LWK004), and a note about the sleeves

Long Weekend are four people in Malmö who put out four records a year and have never once explained themselves. Everything ships in the same printed bag: grey-blue paper, a blue disc, an orange square in the bottom right where the shop sticker goes. I assumed for two years it was just a nice bit of design. It is not. The disc and the square are the cover photograph with everything else taken away, and the photograph is on the inner sleeve where you only find it after you have paid.

The rule, as far as I can work out from three releases: one photograph, one object somebody left behind, and the warm thing in the frame has to sit where that orange square is. LWK004 breaks it, and breaks it for a good reason.

Hovden has one trick and it is a good one. He finds a soul record, leaves the singer at her own pitch, and loops four bars of her until you stop hearing a sample and start hearing somebody in the room telling you something. No sped-up business, no chipmunk edits, which around here counts as a position. Under it, a bassline that never once gets out of the way. The build runs long and stays low, almost annoyingly so, and then the drop arrives and does the whole job in one go.

two inner sleeves this time, one per version

Two versions, so two photographs, shot the same weekend by the same person. The A-side gets the chair: white plastic, standing in two centimetres of water on a flooded pool deck, red towel over the back, someone gone home in a hurry. The flip gets a dead pine on the moor ten kilometres inland, snapped in the same storm, orange heartwood pointing at a flat grey sky. Chair, then no chair. I have been staring at the pair of them all week.

The flip is Ellis Wake, which is the bit that made me sit up, because he is a Free Entry artist and Free Entry do not lend people out. Both labels said yes to me putting it up, so it is above, and it is seven minutes long. He takes the same vocal, stretches it wide over arpeggios and then sits on his hands for four minutes, which on a first listen I mistook for the track not going anywhere. It goes somewhere. The lift arrives around five and a half and I have played it back more times than the A-side. Digital lands in September, vinyl when it lands.

Posted by J. at 11:47 AM · 31 comments · Labels: deep house, long weekend, elias hovden, premiere