Words by Justin Turford
Chromesthesia is defined as “the eliciting of visual images (colours) by aural stimuli; the most common form of synesthesia. The word “synesthesia” comes from the Greek words: “synth” (which means “together”) and “ethesia” (which means “perception”). Synesthetes can often “see” music as colours when they hear it, and “taste” textures like “round” or “pointy” when they eat foods. Individuals with chromesthesia, also known as synesthetes, commonly experience these “colourful senses.
Now I don’t think that Pat Hatchett AKA Kʒːlu (pronounced curlew after his favourite bird back in Cork, Ireland, where he lives) is a synesthete necessarily but the journey that he had to undertake to complete this joyful, cosmically funky and occasionally introspective album demanded some serious sensory adjustments from him.
Struck down with a debilitating right ear problem in late 2022, which messed with “his hearing, his balance, his relationship to sound, and the wider world..(and) without any clear medical answers and faced with extreme sound sensitivity, intense tinnitus and enforced solitude, he adopted an ‘open to anything’ approach, amassing an expansive list of alternative diets, treatments, therapies and introspection.”
This certainly wasn’t the plan when the well respected guitarist, remixer, producer and screen composer (he has worked with reggae and afrobeat royalty like Dennis Bovell, Johnny Clarke and Dele Sosimi as well as playing with Jerry Dammers' Spatial AKA Orchestra and Soothsayers amongst his extraordinary resume) began the project. Responding to the gathering global instability, the aftershocks of Covid and sadly, the recent loss of his mother, he considered the idea of an ‘’intervention… maybe coming from another planet or cosmos.”
“I was imagining a magnificent yet mechanically unstable being sent to earth to deliver glitchy AI generated guidance. Machine-learnt wisdom made up of all history’s religious and spiritual teachings. Proclaiming upcycled self-help jargon, shamanic mutterings all prompted by the same messages we as humans had been proclaiming yet ignoring ourselves for millennia''.
Pat Hatchett
Like Sun Ra or Funkadelic or even Daevid Allen’s Gong before him, Pat took inspiration from the idea of a benign saviour from outside of humanity’s self-flagellation. However, his new and profound physical difficulties changed the narrative somewhat. “So what started out as a tongue in cheek, comic-book premise of alien intervention in humanity’s spiralling decline, was in fact more about my own unravelling personal life, and although I was sadly not visited by a real robot from another dimension I had now received this new inescapable situation that required deep introspection. What messages had I been ignoring or what unused tools did I already possess to help better this situation and my life in general…?”
“And as I listen back to the mixes, I can hear where I have been with this thing – trying to conjure up healing spaces or environments that had previously brought me joy; banishing loneliness with these imagined dancefloors or parties; constructing spiritual big-bands of friends and unknown other worldly musicians, artificially created ensembles and connections that weren’t an option to me with my condition at the time. And despite the need for calm and peace in my life, I also needed to hear and feel these beats and basslines, the riffs and bleeps, to feel hopeful about the future by being connected to my past. So yes there's the backdrop of loss, and loneliness, but delivered in a hopeful joyous, celebratory mash of noise, cultures and colour.”
And so to the music… The opening vignette ‘Proem 1.0’ joins ‘Solid Air’ era John Martyn (Pat is a very sensitive guitarist indeed) with 80s’ Fourth World chill and contemporary glitchiness to form a brief moment of blissful hope that hints at what’s to come - groove, beautifully created space and a palette of instrumentation that blends the analogue and digital into sonically and visually rich colour schemes.
*As an aside, Pat’s wife Becky has produced a series of beautiful artworks to accompany the record, her images vibrating off the canvas, capturing the imagery of the music as expressive ripples of abstracted soundwaves. Buy HERE!
The brilliantly titled ‘Standing Ovation (Good People Of The World)’ channels broken beat, Afro-dub-disco and Weather Report into a joyous dancer that isn’t afraid to get deep down, the arpeggiated breakdown hinting at ‘Ain’t Nobody’ before it slowly uncoils its serpentine funk. Distant vocals suggest echoes of early rave days, the ghosts in the fun machine.
The languid romantic landscape of ‘A Breath In Greyscale’ reminds me of Chris Bowden’s gorgeous and pioneering ‘Time Capsule’ LP from 1996. A honey rich string section, seductive keys and synths (that word again), intricate drums and indecipherable voices arranged to elicit pangs of afterparty saudade and dopamine tingles.
As was highly apparent from his brilliant debut album, Pat’s grasp of West African guitar styles reveals his innate ability to interweave syncopated and brightly lit melodies into tight flickering percussion and slippery bass lines. ‘Still The Voices Come’ (featuring West Cork native Son Of Nowhere AKA Alex Sampson)’ is a continuation of his unusual Afro-cosmic disco sound that took up much of his debut. House but not house, disco but not disco, it demands a dancing response. The vocoder-ised vocals tickle like a persuasive phone app: get up and get to it.
‘Knew No Know’ starts all cosmic Brazilian with strummed cavaquinho and a surdo drum pattern before expanding into a soul jazz sunshine collage of loose horns, gospel chants, cuicas and different keys appearing at all angles. Pinned down with a licorice thick bassline that veers between dub and boogie, the rhythm holds fast as killer solos from individual horns and Pat’s electric guitar take victorious laps of the groove. Wonderful stuff.
‘And All Will Be Right With The World If We Just Learn To Trust’ takes off with a discombobulated robo voice before warming up into another Afro-Spaceship burner. Jigsawing afrobeat, highlife, deeply funky harmonic bass, retro synths and a Balearic spirit - it’s loose and irresistible.
The freewheeling ‘Let It Not Pale’ brings into play elements of 80s’ burger highlife mixed with old and new UK street soul, all halftime drums, dreamy chords, a graceful jazzy soul vocal from Senita Appiakorang, and the usual brilliance of Pat’s glittering guitar playing.
In hues of purples and oranges, the thoughtful final piece ‘Cortis’ really exemplifies the physical difficulties he was experiencing at the time. Super relaxing and meditative, and with some fine acoustic playing, the close miked recording is indicative of how Pat found his way back to creating music. He had to rest his chin on the body of his acoustic guitar to feel its resonance more than hear it, tuning it differently to relieve the painful low end he was experiencing. “The track was written at the height of my hyperacusis (extreme sound sensitivity). With tinnitus masking certain frequencies and a large slice of my low end hearing gone my brain effectively turned up the gain to 11 to try and find the missing information. The result being all sound becoming painful, distorted and often unrecognisable. I spent much of my time wearing ear defenders around the house to soften the impact of even the smallest of noises… named after the Organ Of Cortis in the inner ear became the daily flow or meditation… Four movements based around a simple melodic idea became the framework for improvisation and exploration… When recording for the album I was searching for a sound that resembled the jaw, capo, ear defender, hyperacusis combo and finally settled on a guitarelle take pitched down an octave. It gave it a richness, a strange attack and slightly distorted warm bottom end.”
The aim behind ‘Vol.II Cortis’ was to offer joy and hope to himself and to others on this record and he has fully succeeded in my opinion, simultaneously displaying much more of his compositional talents than his debut album was able to reveal. An immaculate musician with a restless capacity for assimilating different cultural influences into his unique sound and with an identity that is surely his own, Pat Hatchett has taken his isolation and created communion. 9/10