Franz Kirmann - Madrapour (2019)

Madrapour​ is Franz Kirmann’s fourth album and his first for Bytes. It comes three years after ​Elysian Park​, his dystopian and glacial 2016 album released on the German imprint Denovali. During that gap Kirmann has mostly been involved in making soundtracks with his long-term music partner Tom Hodge, most notably for the BBC’s flagship drama ​McMafia​ and the indie documentary T​he Man Behind the Microphone.​

If ​Elysian Park​ was very digital and based on generative music and sound collages, Madrapour​ takes a radically different approach. It was composed exclusively using analog and modular synthesisers and constructed around live jams in Kirmann’s South London studio.

The album takes its title from the French novel of the same name by Robert Merle. Published in 1976, it tells the story of a small group of passengers who embark from a deserted Paris Roissy airport on to a plane bound for Madrapour, an imaginary country that they never reach. The plane never lands and flies indefinitely, the passengers being confronted with each other and reflecting on the meaning of life, decisions they have made and the passing of time.

Madrapour​ is very ambient sounding with its melancholy drenched in reverb, fuzzy synthesisers and sometimes ethnic-sounding modular sequences disintegrating over time (​Slow Snow​, ​Neo Yoff​, ​Angled)​ . There are hardly any beats, except on the slow and visceral Salem​, with the music favouring drones and gorgeous textures (​A Vision​, ​Battersea​) or discrete melodies buried in layers of distortion and echoes (​Rave Ikon​, ​Softer Still​), giving the album a cinematic quality. It unfolds slowly and hauntingly over just under an hour, distilling its restrained emotions gently over time until letting loose on the uplifting final track, Solitary​, a piece that brings that supposedly endless journey to its conclusion.

The album is preceded by a digital-only single (out September 6, 2019), which features album track ​Salem​ and ​Jade,​ an exclusive track not featured on ​Madrapour​. The cassette release is limited to 50 copies, with artwork by Graeme Swinton in the Bytes house-style.