Submersion is the second remix project to emerge from Private Agenda, aka Sean Phillips and Martin Aggrowe`s 2019 long-player, Ile De Reve. Where the previous The Space Between Swells transformed the Berlin-based pair’s `80s referencing pop into bona fide balearic beats, Submersion is an altogether more ambient affair. Delac`s shake of Solitude might boast a fractured, fragmented, broken, house 4 / 4, while Seahawks` manhandling of Malani Ascending may be built on a kosmische bass pulse and eventual motorik march, but the overall collective concept, in keeping with the E.P.`s title, is one of minimal musical landscapes, mapped by microscopic movements created within dizzying drones. Beatless, weightless floats, five fathoms deep. Time suspended in sustain. 

Coral Sea`s beatific bending of Bounty comes on all Iasos, celestial and new age. Their treated atmospherics humming like a calming choral harmony. The music a vapour, a (fluffy) white cloud of sound, similar to the work of Harold Budd & Robin Guthrie, or Brock Van Wey, but blissed-out, warm, not cloaked in ennui or melancholy. Label mate JQ`s Underwater Mix of Sea Life is more introspective in tone, with a lonelier air – suffused with siren-like snatches of ethereal vocal, as sine waves wow and flutter. The sonic equivalent of light catching the scales of some fabulous fish. One minute invisible, camouflaged, a fleeting flash of colour the next. London duo, Delmer Darion, drop Dependency into cavernous reverb. Its piano refrain repeating, distorting, drifting into decay. Describing a daydream-like reverie, a score for moments lost down memory lane. The aforementioned Seahawks – Pete Flower and Jon Tye – send summer birdsong, chimes and sparse, spare keys, spinning in echo. Pedal steel particles caught in the vividly vibrating detail. Going solo as Ocean Moon, Tye picks on P.S.R., where only his use of phased granular glitch prevents the listener from disappearing, transcendentally,  completely. Its steadying itch giving way to a quiet roar, that for me conjured images of rockets jettisoning spent fuel sections on a trajectory set for orbit – free of gravity, for a few minutes, free of our blue world. 

Submersion, and other works by Private Agenda, can be purchased directly from Lo Recordings.