Bleep

Archie Fairhurst’s music as Romare has been described as “patchwork”, “collage”, and “kaleidoscopic” ever since he started releasing back in 2012. Ten years later, he dives even deeper into his collagist aesthetic than he has before, taking the road less travelled and entering a land of sonic adventure where anything is possible on his fourth album Fantasy.

Fantasy acts somewhat like a point of culmination for Romare as he forges his own path, inaugurating his very own label You See Records. He has taken in a vast array of sounds over his musical career - from footwork meditations and churning house rhythms, to swirling jazz and funk mixtures. Fantasy finds room for all of these influences to mingle, brought together by soulful samples abstractly sculpted across each track. Gargantuan club rhythms are interwoven with fleeting snippets of mediaeval incantations, and papery beats are cut with craft knives, glued together by samples sourced from 70s fantasy films and Fairhurst’s own vocals.

With a DIY vision, Romare brings these disparate sounds together into a cohesive whole, starting with the scribbling beats of ‘Quiet Corners Of My Mind’, where detuned guitar plucks sit amongst folksy instruments illustrating journeys across countryside pastures. ‘Priestess’ instantly flips with a dizzying whirlwind of vocal chops and drums arcing from left to right, dissipating into the downtempo downpour of ‘Walking In The Rain’. The darker and more minimal ‘Dungeon’ channels the flapping wings of bats and their echolocation whistles with looming nighttime beats, while ‘Sunset’ scatters lines from Dylan Thomas’s seminal ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ poem over the rhythmic fauna and flora.

At times pop-leaning, at others gleefully leftfield, Romare expertly crafts electronic collages on his fourth album Fantasy.