Milieu - Our Blue Rainbow [Complete Sessions] (2020)

For the odd-numbered occasion of the fourteenth anniversary since it was first issued, OUR BLUE RAINBOW is once again in print (after a brief reinstatement on I, Absentee in 2010, itself already a decade gone) and comes backed by the OUR BLUE REMIXES and OUR BONUS REMIXES albums of reworkings, in a special third edition 3xCD set.

Musically, OUR BLUE RAINBOW always seemed to exist in the in-between spaces, with things like SLOW LID CLOSE or NIGHT CURRENTS right behind us and NEW DRUGS or COLORTONE coming up soon after. It feels like aspects of all of those albums, and yet still also maintains a bittersweetness that isn't really so saturated anywhere else but here. There are many very upbeat moments of optimism and bass-pocket groove juxtaposed against chordal sequences that sound like rainclouds. There are down-tuned and slow-tempo moments that give way to sunny daybreaks and THC-fried memory fog. OUR BLUE RAINBOW is everyone's look back through a breath-smeared bus window, ready to go home, never quite able to, Summer forever around the corner or clipping at your heels as it swiftly passes you by, another wasted magic season in the curvatures of another blurry year.

For me, my Blue Rainbow is full of aching and longing, missing my old friends, my parents, my sister, an electric plant, a lake. Thinking about my old Beretta, bummed out boredom-soaked weekends, having a band but never having anywhere to play. Writing out lists of ideas and names that refused to take form until years, sometimes decades later. Saving things and carrying them around only to realize that the weight of their accumulation wasn't worth the steep ticket fare, and then...here we are anyway, after all, right where we belong.

And here you will find twelve original recordings that hopefully suffuse these thoughts and images into something more valuable than the aggregated act, and if not, you've got two whole albums of excellent remixes from the likes of Am-Boy, Ourson, David Tagg, Adam Pacione, Mrs Jynx, EOD, Brian Ellis, Wisp, Drexon Field and many more, even me hiding in plain sight with a Coppice Halifax remix when Fieldtriqp couldn't make the deadline. All of it collected here in a single tripartite set, ready for another ten years of sad Summers.