Melody As Truth / Netherlands / 2021
MAT is proud to announce the forthcoming release of ‘The Side I Never See’, by Hugh Small & Brian Allen Simon. Hugh forms half of Scottish post-punk duo Vazz, whose work was the subject of a recent retrospective by Belgian label Stroom. Brian is known best for his solo project Anenon, under which name he has released four full length albums and multiple remixes for artists including Ryuichi Sakamoto.
An improvised recording of Brian playing over the Vazz piece ‘Kazimierz’ catalysed this long-distance collaboration; 2000 feet up a mountain in Andalucia, Hugh heard the recording on a broadcast of Brian’s dublab LA radio show. Immediately taken in by Brian’s playing, the pair soon established contact and began discussing the possibility of working to create something new together. The rest, as they say, is history. The results are fully realised in ‘The Side I Never See’, a shimmering suite of ten compositions for piano, saxophone, synthesizer and guitar. In Hugh’s words… ‘so, what is it? It’s Ambient-Punk, Abstract-Jazz, Disaffected-Classical, it’s whatever the fuck you want it to be!’ :-)