Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner. 

Balearic veterans Coyote, Timm Sure and Richard “Ampo” Hampson, have a new five track E.P. out on Brighton’s Higher Love Recordings. One of the duo’s trademark motifs is the use of sampled dialogue. It can be heard in many of their recent releases. Their Andrew Weatherall tribute The Outsider, for example, which sampled a stirring, moving speech by Alan Watts. Café con Leche, a lockdown creation, featured the phrase, “When all this is over, I plan to go north.” Nothing Rests, from last year’s mini-album, revolved around the realization that “Nothing rests, everything moves.”

Coyote’s latest, I Hear A New World (the title borrowed from Joe Meek’s 1960 space age concept album) utilises more found and borrowed voices. The opening track, After All These Years, places Matthew McConaughey, from True Detective, over sunset-flecked acoustic guitars and descending synths, his words indistinct at times and covered in echo, like someone muttering within earshot, but not close enough, but as the piece winds its way onwards, McConaughey becomes clearer – “I know who I am…” – and the combination becomes mesmerising.

On Blowing Through the pair take Charles Bukowski, the bard of down at heel Los Angeles, whose booze-soaked poetry searched for beauty in the broken and bedraggled. Bukowski recites over wispy synths and an electronic shuffle. His hard-won wisdom dispensed through a Balearic haze. “There’s a blue bird in my heart, it wants to get out”, Charlie says as the drum machine pitter patters. The bird only gets out, Bukowski admits, “At night, when everyone’s asleep.” The drums gain some oomph and the synths begin to twinkle before spluttering to an end.

Butterflies is lighter and airier, with an airborne synth pattern and dazzling, repeating melodies dancing about. When the drums come in after two minutes, Butterflies settles into a solid groove. The narrator this time talks about love, and being consumed, before the song breaks down into piano and a swirl of FX.

Coyote head into ambient on the title track, with washes, and waves, the static of radios not quite tuned in, and the sound of signals disintegrating. Things gradually become more focussed, and at three minutes a very brittle acoustic guitar comes in.

The E.P. closes with a collision of sounds and echo, the thump of a drum and the throb of bass. Next Morning Version finds a space where dub, Balearic and nu-classical come together, the trebly top-lines balanced by the warmer lower end. Walls of delay driving its chuggy forward progression. Coyote’s productivity and creativity seems endless at the moment. There’s been release after release, with no drop in quality. I Hear A New World is another ace addition to their outstanding catalogue.

Coyote’s I Hear A New World is out now on Higher Love Recordings.

You can find more proper, on point, prose from Adam Turner over at his own brilliant blog, The Bagging Area. Adam is also part of the admin team at the mighty Flightpath Estate.