by Delia Rainey (@hellodeliaaaaa)
As a new listener of Vanishing Twin, I want to articulate the visual feeling I get through their songs. Maybe it’s like entering a blinking haunted house for robots, or some underwater jazz club toned in purples, drifting while an organ or flute feeds off steady drums. As warm and familiar as a fuzzy vinyl record, yet I’ve never heard this before.
Vanishing Twin’s newest album, Ookii Gekkou (“big moonlight” in Japanese) came out in mid-October 2021 on Fire Records, who also put out their eerily-titled The Age of Immunology in 2019. The London-based group of experimental psychedelia is composed of singer/guitarist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti, bassist Susumu Mukai, Elliott Arndt on flute, and Phil MFU on electronic synth and other odd noise.
The band claims many influences from the 1960s and 70s, such as Alice Coltrane and Art Ensemble of Chicago, and most listeners can detect echoes of Stereolab and Broadcast. Lucas’ vocals groove in a looping train of haunting clarity, instantly directing my memory to Trish Keenan’s “Come On Let’s Go.” However much Vanishing Twin honors electronica and free-jazz of the past, Ookii Gekkou swirls these genres into something else ever-changing, as we would hope music in the future would do.
Although all nine tracks stand alone as their own experience, Magaletti’s masterful percussion grounds them. With swift fills and swishing snares like feet shuffling to and from worlds, she never lets us diverge from her orbit. The drums hook us in from the start with title track “Big Moonlight”: a slower creepy song, touched by vampiric organ and bells. Bass and guitar wake-up to the psychedelic “Phase One Million”: a head-bobber and cowbell-banger with Lucas’ catchy chorus “we are looking for a sign, looking for a sign…”. “Zuum” (shortened breath of “zoom golly golly”) follows with Twilight Zone electronic knobbing and a lead clarinet (?). At first it appears to be an instrumental track, until Lucas arrives with weirdness: “Do I want a human head?”
Being trapped in a body is a main conflict. A speaking trance like hypnosis language comes on “The Organism,” wondering if this is all a simulation, as a marimba flutters by other pulsing sounds. The song itself becomes the interior of a machine, an alive nervous system. Harmonic flute swings through “In Cucina” with a dream-like melody, gelled by jazzy bass, pops of intuitive drum and indiscernible chanting.
The album begins to feel more conclusive in “Wider Than Itself,” a contemplative tune led by chorusy guitar. Something always breaks up the dream, though: autotune robot vocals, funky breakdowns and electro glitches. Mukai’s bass-line harnesses the closer, “The Lift,” and staccato soft verses bloom into a spiritual awakening -- “I am” turns into “We are” -- the singular eye (“I”) becomes collective, “synchronized.” Out of context, this seems drugged-out and cheesy, but Vanishing Twin’s execution is thrilling.
“Vanishing twin” refers to Lucas’ autobiographical absorption of her twin in the womb; an other-body morphing into that dark space of preexistence. This event melds with the mysterious and searching tone of Lucas’ unwavering voice, the improv-inspired instrumentals guiding the way. Ookii Gekkou, formed and finished during the uncertain times of the pandemic, collects the moods of the unknown.