PENGUIN CAFÉ

Handfuls Of Night ERASED TAPES Elegiac strides across epic landscapes from Penguin dynasty.

There’s suspense from the very first drones and piano probes. Suspense was always the great quality of Penguin Café Orchestra, and so it proves with the next generation. Arthur Jeffes, proprietor of the café, is the son of the late Simon Jeffes, leader of the orchestra, and continues his father’s dramatic fusion of understatement and repetition. That suspense lies in waiting, guessing, unsure if there’ll be a sonic shift. Sometimes a motif replays like a musical mantra; sometimes there are surprises which, while subtle, bowl you over because you’ve been lulled into this sensual world of ambient minimalism. Handfuls Of Night is hushed but haunting.

It bears another link to Jeffes’ ancestry. Scott of the Antarctic was married to the musician’s great grandmother before she married his great grandfather. Not content with the potential to dine out on that tidbit, Jeffes in 2005 followed in the explorer’s snowy footsteps by joining – at the request of the BBC – an expedition recreating Scott’s last trip of 1911. After three months dog-sledding across glaciers and ice fields, an altered psychological state ensued. Jeffes found it inspirational, and began composing “internal music” in his head. Threads of that emerge here, as does further music created in 2018, when Greenpeace commissioned him to write awareness-raising pieces corresponding to four Antarctic breeds of penguin. So we’re walking in a wintry wonderland, where mood, mystery and melancholy are elemental.

That said, among the penguin-inspired numbers, there’s a hint of mischief in Chinstrap and a swell of relative loquaciousness in Chapter, which ends in rhythmic glitching, while The Life Of An Emperor has nimble charm to match its contemporary classical nobility. At The Top Of The Hill, They Stood… is however more representative of the forlorn planet of lonely yearning which this music inhabits, and noting that some aspects are very Michael Nyman-influenced doesn’t immunise you to its emotional heft. Pythagoras On The Line Again, that opens and closes with a kind of Morse code beeping which only increases the feeling of being far from home, curls and rumbles with finely balanced beauty. Space is important here, but time? That just slips away.

You might spy a harmonium in there among the pianos, violins and cellos, and even a synthesiser, but Penguin Café’s music is more concerned with the result, the effect, than the mechanical nuts and bolts. In these lilting landscapes, the why matters more than the how. Arthur Jeffes is doing the legacy of his father, and indeed his great grandmother’s first husband, proud.

A SENSUAL WORLD… HUSHED BUT HAUNTING.