«A funky-psychedelic journey through the music composed by Rod Temperton»
Dive head first into a parallel universe where the facts of music history have been turned into pliable putty and an alternative world where Rod Temperton never met Quincy Jones, never joined Heatwave and never wrote songs for the greatest pop soul artists of the 70’s and 80’s BUT instead, hung out at a West Berlin commune with a cast of trans-continental musicians playing a hybrid of post-psychedelic rock with overtones of Ghanaian funk and early 80s synth experimentation all the while exploring the mystic tundras of the mind and the celestial palisades of the soul…
This is the parallel universe that the Suffolk based studio dwellers, Pleasurewood inhabit. Let them take you on a journey through some of Temperton’s biggest hits in only a way that Pleasurewood’s genre defying style and studio prowess will allow.
Heatwaves kicks off on vinyl, with a tasty 7” Double A side that is dance floor ready…
It’s an off-kilter affair from side one with “Off The Wall” swirling in a dense fog of phased bass guitar and emerging onto the shore with jutting hips to a groove underpinned by a sweating percussion section and early forms of synthesiser soaring above like crazed Pteranodons.
On the flip side is “Boogie Nights” striding slowly and purposefully into frame with an apocalyptic Bass guitar line riding a solitary cowbell before a synthesiser clarion ushers in the break and the familiar hook with Moog thunder-strikes glowering in the distance.
If Hip Hop also exists in Pleasurewood’s parallel universe, then so too must crate-diggers and “Thriller” would be a much sought-after treasure. In this instance entering into the sonic scape like the opening scene of a sci-fi movie where reverberant wisps of water-phone are the prelude to a pulsating drum and bass guitar groove with cosmic morse synth notes riding in like a surfer skimming intergalactic waves with an Eddie Hazel-esque guitar solo then riding off into the upper troposphere.
Another highlight on this 7 track sizzler to mention is Pleasurewood’s extrapolation of “The Groove Line“. Wrong-footing the listener with dull clanking drum machine percussion and Omni-chord swoops with a syncopated latin-styled guitar line jumpstarting a groove reminiscent of Cymande – this is all atmospheric pressure that you can throw b-boy shapes to.
