After a while, life as a singer-songwriter must get pretty boring. Everyone assumes your songs are intimate confessionals, diaries of your life. Everyone expects you to play an acoustic guitar, sing plaintively and generally behave like the most diligent Dylan wannabe. And after a while longer, everyone who still buys your new records seems to live in France, where loyalty to this romantic and classical sort of thing is much more pronounced.
This was the situation facing Pete Astor at some murky point in the middle of the last decade. In the '80s, as the erudite, historically-aware and occasionally leather-trousered leader of The Loft and The Weather Prophets, Astor had been Creation's secret weapon, if never quite their biggest seller. In the '90s, however, his solo career had become a little, shall we say, moribund. But where most in his situation would probably sulk and become ever more entrenched in tradition, Astor did an uncommonly smart thing. He went underground, listened to a lot of very good post-rock and electronica, fell in with a multi-instrumentalist called David Sheppard and started making eccentric, atmospheric, really quite eclectic music. Singles multiplied across myriad labels - many released as The Wisdom Of Harry and collected a couple of years ago on the fine 'Stars Of Super 8' LP.
And whilst Astor still occasionally let his songwriter roots show through in The Wisdom Of Harry, his and Sheppard's other project quietly moved further leftfield. 'Ellis Island Sound' rounds up various singles, outtakes and remixes from the years between 1997 and 2001, but manages to be coherent and engrossing in spite of the disparate sources. Essentially, this is lightly-charged atmospheric music: artful manoeuvres of the acoustic and electronic; spluttering drum machines and folk guitars; small-scale operations that unexpectedly bloom into expansive themes.
These are the kind of instrumentals habitually tagged cinematic, bright and bracing music for driving and thinking. Occasionally - on the superb 'Ranch Stuff', say - there's a sense that this might be how Tortoise would've sounded had they been born in London, away from the jazz and hardcore traditions of Chicago. There are clear signs, too, that Ellis Island Sound anticipated the odd trend: a 1999 remix of 'Your Twisted Sister' by forgotten major label fodder Little Mothers (sub-Gomez, if memory serves) fuses the pastoral and the digital with similar delicacy and confidence to the more recent work of Four Tet, amongst others.
It's a good example, too, of Astor and Sheppard's remixing technique, where indie crud is completely remodelled as something hazy, evocative, often strikingly beautiful. So cobblers like The Regular Fries (remember them?) find their hamfisted funk magically turned into something lush and expressive. And more miraculous yet, the Manic Street Preachers' 'Ocean Spray' is drained of bombast and reworked as an ebbing meditation for organ and drumbox, rather like '70s Krautrock supergroup Harmonia, that'll leave Manics fans shaking their empty heads in bewilderment. Good work.
It's at times like this that Pete Astor's pleasure in reinvention is really asserted. He saved himself from mediocrity. And now there's no reason why he can't do the same for others, whether they like it or not.
