Photo: Dan Medhurst
Dan Leavers, better known as Danalogue, has spent years shaping the UK’s adventurous jazz and electronic underground. Known as one the driving forces behind The Comet Is Coming, as well as one half of Soccer96 and a member of Flock, the trailblazing synthesist, collaborator and producer is a core figure of East London’s Total Refreshment Centre community, and has worked with artists such as Sarathy Korwar, Snapped Ankles, Alabaster DePlume, Momoko Gill and Rozi Plain, amongst many others.
Back in November, Danalogue shared his debut solo single, ‘Sonic Hypnosis’ and hinted at a new album. Now, details of his debut solo album have finally emerged. Entitled Teleportations, the record was entirely performed by him, using mostly vintage analogue gear, including instruments such as the Roland Juno-60, SH-09 and Jupiter-4, alongside Oberheim synths and old samplers. According to the press release, Danalogue embraced the limitations and tactility of older machines as a way of forging a “time bridge” with earlier eras of electronic experimentation, not to recreate the past, but to imagine “travelling back with modern sensibilities and telling the future through old machines”. Science fiction plays a central role in the album, with Danalogue drawing inspiration from ideas around astral travel, theta brainwaves and collective consciousness, as well as from the work of figures like Jean Giraud, Ernst Bloch and Hayao Miyazaki. The mythology extends further through a short story written alongside the record, imagining an advanced lifeform capable of converging brainwaves into a shared stream of consciousness and travelling across space. Danlogue’s idea was to invite listeners to a “teleportation programme”, where sound and motion guide them through shifting emotional states. Teleportations is described as “a warm, playful and immersive album that transforms endings, grief and personal upheaval into a vivid science-fictional voyage of escape, healing and renewal.”
Musically, the upcoming record draws from celestial ambience, kosmische electronics, space disco, jazz-funk and deep Detroit house, and Danalogue cites artists such as Joe Meek, Wendy Carlos, Isao Tomita, Laurie Spiegel, Mort Garson and Terry Riley, and groups like Harmonia and Kluster, as influences.
We’ll have to wait until May 29th for Teleportations to be out through Castles in Space but we can already hear the first single, ‘Far Beyond The Sun’, a sensual and hypnotic space-age ballad about crossing the galaxy to meet a loved one in the afterlife. The single comes with accompanying visuals made by Charles Prest. Watch it now.
