Recording of the Week, GoGo Penguin - Everything Is Going To Be OK

GoGo Penguin (Images: Emily Dennison)

In the week where streaming services including Spotify and Apple Music decided to pull an AI-generated pop song from their platforms over copyright issues, many listeners are left wondering how artists can endure in a world where synthetic ‘ghost-musicians’ are accounting more and more for creative expression. As if to confront the wider theme of the new dark age in which we now find ourselves, GoGo Penguin’s new album, Everything Is Going To Be OK on XXIM Records, tackles these cybernetic causes for alarm in light of the established environmental concerns facing humanity on a global scale.

From an audible perspective, the most striking element of this recording arrives in the form of the sonic evolution the group has undergone, especially Chris Illingsworth’s piano by way of the Palm Mute Pedal (followers of Nils Frahm will be familiar with this particular appliance already). Similar to pressing a finger on the string, this piece of kit allows the player to apply a long strip of felt over vast stretches of the piano’s strings, producing a sonic effect that combines a restrained feathery pizzicato tone with an elongated harplike sustain.

This is drummer Jon Scott’s first full-length outing with the group after the EP, Between Two Waves, and the single, Erased By Sunlight, were both released last year following the departure of Rob Turner in late 2021. Fresh from touring with Ethio-jazz titan Mulatu Astatke, Scott takes the percussive reigns with full might as if they were his to begin with – his cymbals sizzle with delight as he highlights crucial emotional peaks throughout the record, traversing from the dub-like breaks of ‘Friday Film Special’ to the trip-hop bombast of ‘Soon Comes Night’.

The masterful exercise in tension-building – perhaps the group’s signature device (but by no means a compositional cliche) – that can be heard on tracks such as ‘Glimmerings’ depicts the group as experts in their tweaking of the chill-rave components that have come to be synonymous with this brand of British jazz; carrying the torch on from where others such as the since disbanded Neil Cowley Trio have left off. On ‘Saturnine’, bassist Chris Blacka softly dances across the upper range of his instrument with polyrhythmic ease, his feel inspired by the waving arm of the lucky-cat ornament he keeps in the group’s studio. ‘Last Breath’ calls into mind the vibrant ecological palette of Eberhard Weber’s Colours of Chloe, with Blacka’s lone double bass once again serving as the last call of nature, a solitary beacon in a world ravished by looming climate disaster.

The crisp friction of this genre-pushing trio largely sets the sound-profile for the record as a whole, inviting the listener to contemplate the meaning of the ensemble’s experimental timbres within the familiarity of the syncopated hypergrooves for which they have come to be known. Through a melange of analogue and digital techniques, each player develops the sonic possibilities of their primarily acoustic instruments in the same manner EDM producers may approach new modular rhythms and synth patches. In GoGo Penguin’s case, however, this allows the group to pursue their electronic influences without always resorting to the use of electronic devices themselves.

It’s this contrast between the organic and synthetic that summarises the core message of the album. As AI, facial recognition and other pernicious technologies assume an insidious role within our day-to-day lives, what freedoms are to be lost, creative, spiritual or otherwise? On the other hand, what, in this time of authorial dispute, can artists reclaim?

Addressing these issues, the music video for lead single, ‘Parasite’ (produced by TENTACLE), features CCTV-style camera footage of Manchester city-centre, observing unaware passers-by from angles both high and low before merging into a psychedelic montage of crowds, skyscrapers and amorphous polyhedrons. Sometimes anxious, and, at others, ethereal, GoGo Penguin’s lush sonic extremities paired with trippy kaleidoscopic visuals suggest in part that the irresistible rise of the modern surveillance state can best be explained or understood via the intuition of the artists who have no choice but to experience life from within it. Art, particularly music, is the sonic combatant of these ominous trends. Whilst Everything Is Going To Be OK compels us to look forward with cautious optimism, it reminds us that, in spite of our uncertain post-human future, it presently remains very human indeed.

Images: Emily Dennison