Part man, part geometric paradox (a circle can’t be a square, that’s just silly), Circlesquare is Vancouver born Jeremy Shaw, now resident of Berlin, where I can only imagine his particular brand of stripped-back, spacious and laconic electronica plays well with the minimal after party set. He’s been putting out tracks since 1999, carefully honing a vocal-driven sound that simultaneously manages to evoke both warmth and isolation, but when his label Output went tits up in 2006 Circlesquare vanished for a while.

Until now.

Oooooh, the suspense.

SUSPENSE OVER! On January 27th, Circlesquare released his much anticipated ‘return to the world of the living’ album ‘Songs About Dancing and Drugs’. It is, unsurprisingly, a sequence of songs about dancing and drugs. There is also some talk of science, but ‘Songs About Dancing and Science’ isn’t really the kind of title to get the kiddies frothing at the mouth. ‘Songs About Dancing and Science’ sounds more like the sort of 1970s BBC educational throwback that your Year 10 Physics teacher would play in order to try and make the physics of motion ‘hip’ and ‘exciting’ for the young kidz… Which this album isn’t…

What it is, then, is an album dripping with late night torpor, a more lethargic, less glitchy Matthew Dear, and an extended nocturne for the electronic generation. He also mentions that he’s inspired by Leonard Cohen, which jumps him up at least 50 points in my estimation. Really, it’s one of those ‘soundtrack’ albums, a la Burial’s ‘Untrue’: those records that you can only play under a specific set of circumstances, but whenever those circumstances arrive you can’t imagine listening to anything else. It’s night, but it’s a particular brand of night, and a particular time.

Which also makes it kinda hard to pick out just one track to serve as the album’s representative in the blogosphere, but to my mind the best summation of the LP is the final track ‘All Live But The Ending’, a peculiarly nostalgic, gently rolling epic that cruises along for 13 narcotized minutes on a bed of creeping synths, haunted echoes and questions about the quality of your drug experience. It really is quite lovely… and makes you want to go out and consume an heroic amount of illicit substances. Not that I’d have any idea what that’s like. Of course.

Circlesquare – All Live But The Ending

The album is out now in CD, vinyl, MP3 and papier mache forms so go out and get it. STAT. Also, if you do find a papier mache version, be sure to let me know. I’m almost positive it’s fictional.

-luke