Bleep

Plaid aren’t ones to stray far from conceptuality. Indeed, the melodic confluences of their richly textured electronica have always taken place in highly creative soundworlds, yet they’ve never dived so deep into conceptual ideas as on their 11th studio album. Beamed as bodies of light down to the planet Falorx for the infinite festival Feorm, Ed Handley and Andy Turner play an interstellar live set transforming their sound and themselves.

Feorm Falorx imagines what might happen when musicians are removed from time, space, and the physical limits of their bodies. Take the incorporeal hyperfolk of ‘Return to Return’, with the trickling, frenzied particles of atomised harps and guitars played by thousands of fingers, or the digital baroque of ‘Perspex’ with twinkling chrome melodies made of dappled light. It’s all incredibly fitting in the dawning age of AI art, where Plaid merge evermorphing generative ideas with their human touch.

Formed around this fictional live performance, Plaid distill their live energy into an expansive set of tracks, in which their past discography is prismatically split and scrambled into shining traces of elasticated percussion and frazzled synths. The taut, kinetic pulses of ‘C.A.’ and the metallic arrow piercing the sound barrier on ‘Wide I’s’ make the heart thump and lurch. ‘Nightcrawler’ with longtime collaborator Mason Bee carries an enveloping stadium atmosphere, a propulsive synth rock jam of stargazing shoegaze and short circuiting vocal cuts.

Plaid embark on a mind and body bending experience on Feorm Falorx, taking their music further out than ever before.