Premiere: Ian Drennan - Curve of Infinity

The New Jersey composer goes straight for the funny bone on the startling first taste of his second album.

Ian Drennan is an artist from New Jersey who first pricked our ears last summer with his debut album ‘The Wonderful World’. Pleasurably difficult, it chopped a path through genre – jazz, psychedelia, classical – to find new lines amidst the fall-out. It felt the work of a busy mind, a point proven by the first signs of a brand new album just months later.

Curve of Infinity is taken from Drennan’s second album ‘Prelude To Bleu Bird Cabaret’, due on new label PIKdisc set up by Underwater Peoples’ Ari Stern. It’s a bit of double-take of track, one that sets up the album’s ambitious aim, as the press release lays bare, “to burn the effigy of current, malformed cultural aspirations in the flames of histrionic comedy”. In plain terms, the gently coo-ing chords of a keyboard are rudely interrupted by a gaggle of laughing men. It both evokes white male privilege – the accent’s a dead giveaway and who else has the leisure time to guffaw so self-satisfyingly for the track’s four minutes and fifty-three seconds – and curses it. Yet there’s a terrifying edge, a reality we’re confronted with that rises like damp as the track progresses. There’s actually something of James Ferraro’s ‘Far Side Virtual’ to Curve of Infinity, that strange, uneasy space between satire and obsession that characterises 21st century life. Listen below, and be warned: hysteria is kinda unavoidable.