Some people hate Christmas; the crushingly fake premise, the naked greed, the license many feel it gives them for excess and an exemption from the consequences.
It’s certainly not a festival of the arts; all of the music associated with its wearisome traditions is as abject as it’s horribly familiar. For those seeking escape from its crushing banality, the answer is usually to switch off the television and ensconce themselves within a more satisfying experience.
For them, Virginia Wing & Xam Duo‘s collaboration could offer a kind of anti-Yule solace. To make sure unfamiliarity doesn’t hinder our new relationship, it’s worth noting that the latter are Matthew Benn and Christopher Duffin of Leeds bands Deadwall and Hookworms respectively, with the former being Londoners Sam Pillay and Alice Merida Richards.
You assume Benn and Duffin won the argument as to where Tomorrow’s Gift would be recorded – rather than somewhere in the capital, the forty-eight-hour session took place in an industrial estate in Bradford – but on listening it’s clear the avant garde soundscape the quartet assemble owes little to their immediate environment. To this miasma, the cast has though brought elements of their repertoire, notably VW’s frosty, Nordic-influenced synth pop squared with Hookworms’ free spinning psychedelic trips and the grainy art-rock of Deadwall’s album The Zero Cliff.
Or at least some of these things; their work is more than a jigsaw of personalities and templates, revelling in contradictions, the fruits of a two-day jam that was the definition of a journey unconcerned with a destination. Of all the phases, opener Birch Polygon is most obviously the child of improvisation: at more than twenty minutes long, discipline becomes an esoteric concept as Richards intones her murmured stories against a constantly shifting wall of noise and saxophone blare, the lasting effect a frequently abrasive skirmish with unreality.
This isn’t ‘normal’, in a perfect world though we’d be more open as a tribe to understanding the post-classical dismantling of traditional structures, an abandoning of the narrow consciousness which was the 20th century’s conceit of creativity as purely entertainment. It’s a forlorn hope, but one that the foursome happily cling to; the recurring themes of weightlessness, dislocation and ambiguity running through Look Again, Melon Pan and closer A Tunnel, all somewhere between sketch or photograph according to the listener’s perception.
Only once does the sensory overload coalesce into a song; the easier flow of Good Roads Fair Weather allowing the quartet to place their experimentation on hold and craft something from the ether with an aura of sophistication. By design it’s a singular moment, although the tribal noir of Person To Person also rejects layers for intent.
Tomorrow’s Gift isn’t an easily digestible or navigated record. But if you’re one of those who dread every moment of Christmas, and if the endlessly recycled sophism of the period makes you weep, it could offer an escape from acting and thinking by rote, ensnaring you in the celebratory noise made by faith of a different kind.
