Homelife - Exotic Interlude
(CD/LP) Humble Soul HS302CD/HS302LP, 2009-10-05

Tracklisting :
01. Circles
02. Along The Verge
03. Sunday Streets
04. Lincoln Square
05. Exotic Interlude
06. Lazy Man
07. Everywhere
08. More Wine
09. Atlas
10. Trapdoor

Links :
madwaltz.net
myspace.com/madwaltz
humblesoul.net/artists/homelife

Press Release :
"Your houses, they look like cakes!" (Japanese visitor to Manchester 1993)

The world of the exotic lives in the imagination, a way of looking at the world. A useful way of coping now we live on Google Earth, mapped and finite, a shrunken head. More than an interlude, Homelife have painted an Exotic English landscape. An urban crust on heathen clay, the village green from tower blocks. The tower blocks seen distant from green hill sides, Pagan pylons bathed in antiseptic sunlight fingers. Bright moulds, vines and blooms on Victorian iron decay. Feel the sandstone turn to limestone, rock of ages, dirty flags, caves of blue john, land of lakes and red brick evening glow. Exotic Interlude is a mature work, slow brewed. I feel I’ve heard it all in a dream, it's familiar but utterly strange. It might be words engaging me, emotions I can empathize with, uncomfortably honest, sweetened by being set amongst gardens of glowing music. The music is both ethereal yet earthy, with heavy use of acoustic timbres, swarms of coloured percussion, bulbous synths and fresh use of languid Hawaiian guitar. A timeless English summer of a record.

Biography :
Paddy Steer and Tony Burnside have now amassed a sizable back catalogue of releases under the moniker HOMELIFE . It's almost a home recording experiment that grew into an orchestra, gathering in some of Manchester's finest musicians, one by one, to create the work with a craftsman's care. Then with equal attention to detail to recreate the music and take it on tour: a labour of love which continued for several years. Then at some point this "red giant" exploded into a "white dwarf": Paddy, it seems, decided that he would play all the instruments at once. 'Madness!' I hear you say: except that this is what appears to be happening as he sits at the drum kit, plays bass with his feet and wields dozens of homemade instruments into some strange kinetic sculpture. Now a duo, Tony's song-writing has come to the fore, nicely balanced by the DIY approach to the instrumentation that keeps it more akin to outsider music than traditional song forms.

French Press Release :
Psychédélisme lounge et soul transcendantale, soft rock et exotica de Manchester: les nouvelles folk songs d'Homelife ont plusieurs caractéristiques rares, dont la quiétude et l'érudition sympathique à l'origine de cette off-beat pop déjà parfaitement au goût de Gilles Peterson (BBC «Worldwide»).
Une décennie d'existence, une demie-douzaine d'albums (dont 2 chez Ninja Tune) et de projets annexes (dont une BO de film), ce collectif mancunien encore sous-estimé de ce côté-ci de la Manche a compté jusqu'à 18 membres et enregistre depuis 1997. Ramené à son noyau originel -les 2 fondateurs Paddy Steer et Tony Burnside-, Homelife enthousiasme avec son nouvel album, Exotic Interlude (rebaptisé Interlude Exotique et agrémenté d’inédits pour sa version française), étendard folk-soul hand & home-made. Avec toutes sortes d'instruments, d'éléments de percussion, de guitares hawaïennes bricolées ou non, traités et assemblés avec classe et naturel, cet album est doué d'une sobriété émouvante et d'une maturité évidente.
Paddy Steer et Tony Burnside ont amassé ensemble une expérience musicale riche (depuis vingt cinq ans) de reggae comme de blues, de jazz comme de pop. Cet album, c'est un peu l'enregistrement maison (dans le grenier-studio) d'un duo qui grandit comme un orchestre: le multi-instrumentiste Steer a décidé d'occuper tous les postes et Burnside, en crooner lucide et lyrique, affine des chansons qu'on n'a plus envie de quitter.