Like all the festival late nights you can’t go to; ‘Through The Eyelet’, Islet’s pristine new EP, is a hypnotic, mood-shifting 20 minutes that takes in the higher highs and the glorious come down of it all.
Mera Bhai’s ethereal acid house remake of ‘Radel 10’ (named after the electronic tabla unit that powers its ambience), to the haunting industrial rumble of French-Galician Mounqup’s jazzy hues on ‘Good Grief’; through Despicable Zee’s stripped back chill out reverberation that underpins her remix of ‘Treasure’ to fellow Welsh artist Gwenno’s gorgeous somnambulist tumble into ‘Geese’; this is Islet re-imagined – an electronic muse re-made and re-modelled… glanced through a kaleidoscope of other people’s consciousness.
The much-travelled Mera Bhai makes ‘Radel 10’ pulsate with influences from his sojourns to India, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria combined with the tropical-psychedelia of his day job as a member of Flamingods.
Karthik Poduval aka Mera Bhai: “I’ve loved Islet for the duration of my musical career, since we met we have developed a kinship, a familial understanding; ‘Radel 10’ is such a beautiful track, I felt more like I wanted to take a psychedelic walk with it rather than flip it or make it into something new. To me it feels like a bit of a festival sunset remix, sat atop a field, listening to Islet with Sigur Ros sounds swimming over from one side of the festival and Chemical Brothers on the other.”
From there we traverse Mounqup’s eerie beats as they oscillate around Emma Daman Thomas’s ethereal gasps; this is another world from where we wander, haphazardly into a sunlit glade, where Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani aka Despicable Zee diffuses and deconstructs all that was Islet, adding her own own voice and lyrics “I’ve been waiting all my life to speak my truth/to find the fire that’s inside me”; the beat goes on.
And so, we awake, half aware, dead-eyed and drowsy, invigorated by Gwenno’s re-imagining of ‘Geese’, an uplifting exit, a chilled and doubletaked rejoinder to “Be my paradise.” Ah, bliss.
Gwenno: “Islet are one of Wales’ finest bands, and one of my favourites so it has been an absolute honour to collaborate on this.”
Artwork by Emma Daman Thomas.
Visuals by Sam Wiehl.
