Photo: Suzie Howell

Back in 2020, multi-instrumentalist Jack Wyllie (Portico Quartet/Szun Waves) unleashed his new collaborative project, Paradise Cinema, and a self-titled debut album. Four years on, a new Paradise Cinema album will be released with contributions from Khadim Mbaye, Tons Sambe and Laurence Pike. Entitled returning, dream, the album is influenced by the likes Jon Hassell, Terry Riley, Don Cherry and Midori Takada, also tappig into contemporary electronic, ambient and non-western music and is also inspired by physics and science fiction. About the album, Wyllie comments:

“It is an imagining of what music could be like in a different time and space, ancient and futuristic from everywhere and nowhere at once. I was listening to a lot of physics podcasts when I created this record. I loved the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; about multiple worlds splitting off like branches on a tree when faced with quantum choices. I could imagine different histories and worlds and multiple versions of myself, others and even other societies existing. In this album I’ve dug into these ideas and attempted to make music that would come from those different spaces, trying to poke my finger through to the other selves and stories. Effectively a form of composed science fiction, the music is an idea of what might be occurring or have occurred on a branch of the tree in a very different world. But I like to think the tracks might actually have been composed somewhere or sometime.”

returning, dream is out on September 13th through Gondwana Records and Paradise Cinema are enticing us with the gorgeous, celestial and serene opening track, ‘a morning in the near future’,  featuring Jack Wyllie on flute, synths and drum machines with Tons Sambe on Tama drums. Take a listen below.