Riz Maslen started her music career around the time of the Acid House explosion, initially singing for the likes of Future Sound Of London and playing keys with The Beloved. Before long she'd moved on to her own production, recording under nom-de-disques like Neotropic and Small Fish With Spine.
It's been the former project that has given her music some profile though. Since signing to Ntone in 1995, she has delivered two LP's under the Neotropic moniker; '15 Levels Of Magnification' and 'Mr Brubakers Strawberry Alarm Clock', both of which have been well received and highlighted a penchant for electronic exploration and a desire to build emotional texts from machines.
'La Prochaine Fois' has a quite definite focus in that it has been written for a film, which is also included on a CD Rom with the album. Teaming up with collaborators like Paul Jason Fredericks, Nick McCabe (ex Verve) and Sally Herbert (who has written string arrangements for the Manic Street Preachers), Maslen has set about constructing a wide range of well expressed sentiments and image music via samples, acoustics and an imaginative methodology.
There's a folky, pastoral edge to the album that maybe harks back to Maslen's childhood (she was bought up in a Gloucestershire village). Songs like 'Sunflower Girl' bring wonderfully sweet harmonics, wistful strings and unhurried acoustics to the fore, and The Man Who Catches Clouds is a romantic roam through Latinesque horn progressions and soundtrack backgrounds.
On tracks like 'Cornershop Candy', she lends her vocals to the mix, mingling an ethereal voice with haunting sounds and subversive clinks and clanks; the whole LP in fact is shot through with shards of found sound and weird and wonderful interludes that seem to spring up from nowhere but add texture and an often spooky kind of beauty.
With it's elegiac string tracks, introspective acoustic roams, beat-freaked workouts and sudden dark surges, there is no escaping the fact that this is a well produced and inventive slice of film music.
