Witnessing a change in cultural consumption: RyefieldSociety and James A. McDermid’s split release explores the bittersweet contradictions of local place and tourist space.
‘S’accommoder | Perdido’ is a wonderfully poignant and reflective split release by Ryefield Society – a French musician living in Germany – and James A. McDermid – a musician from the UK now residing in Portugal.
Ryefield Society is a one-man project by Fantin M who delivers electronic music composed of contemplative melodies, abstract textures and downtempo beats. Ryefield Society released their first EP The Alternative Path Of Abstraction in 2020 and a fabulous first LP Artless Ostinati followed in 2023 – an album concerned with never-ending worries and remaining teen dreams shaped by unhurried pads, ambient piano and hazy guitars.
James A. McDermid creates beautiful music drenched in the ghosts of memories, feelings and place. In Little Swallows is one of my favourite releases in his discography – one that pulls you in and keeps calling you back. While 2021’s Post Tenebras Lux EP saw slow brushstrokes of light push through layers of haunted darkness. Alongside a wonderful back catalogue of experimental works, James also ran the label mailbox between 2020-2022.
In these bittersweet places
The collected EPs of S’accommoder and Perdido are united by evolving ambient soundscapes as well as themes established during shared conversations about how local culture is consumed in European cities like Paris, Lisbon and Cologne. At the same time, this release on the Italian label rohs! recordsis very much a showcase of both musician’s individual voice.
The value of culture – both in the notions of attracting and being attracted to – is questioned throughout both EPs. Especially who is local culture for? Is it for the denizens of cities to feel a sense of pride and connection to the past, or for paying tourists to view on a city break? What does local now mean in a metaverse of viral jump cuts and algorithmic-centrictrends?
S’accommoder and Perdido look inwardly into the shifting identities of these beautiful European cities, ones which are reliant on tourism and foreign investment to survive. This collection feels like captured fleeting moments presented with verité, a few streets removed from principal tourist activity.
S’accommoder – French for ‘accommodate’ and Perdido – Portuguese for ‘lost’ could be thematic scores for two acts of a European art film, where the interior mind of the individual artist dissolves into the local environs and contemplates the surroundings they experience.
S’accommoder
Ryefield Society seeks peace and solace in the bittersweet spaces between anxious industry, gentrification and tourist-centric cityscapes. S’accommoder creates a series of overcast polaroid snapshots – of walks alongside graffitied train lines and lesser-known green spaces – taking the listener across urban landscapes built-up from melancholic acoustics and reoccurring melodies.
Across four tracks, S’accommoder is a study of contemplative places through a measured interweaving of layers which imply a conflict between movement and stasis. Ryefield Society subtly sculpts a sensation of travelling in a daze, where the exterior world one is walking around blends with the murmur of waking thoughts ultimately seeking relief in love, light and colour.
With a title inspired by a line in Richard Wright’s novel ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’, ‘A dead world of sunshine and rain’ slowly reveals itself. Evoking an aching sense of familiarity but also of social invisibility, the opening track feels like inhabiting the world outside of the world. Warm pads hover over glimpses of conversation and sounds of a passing train, before being joined by a softly bubbling arp and looped guitar motif which resembles circling, disquieting thoughts.
The titles of ‘Graveside shelters I & II’ seem to be symbolic of a continuous pattern of decline and regrowth, with the structure in question being an archaic piece of church furniture oncedeemed necessary but now a relic of the past. ‘Graveside shelters I’ weaves birdsong with the vibrations of natural space, miniature slivers of voice and footsteps with guitar picking, the forlorn chime of a struck metallophone and arcadian synths.Elements across the two Graveside shelters seem tosimultaneously ascend and descend, mirroring the ebb and flow of life.
Part II of Graveside shelters sees a return of a melodic line, alongside small bursts of static, a pulsing heartbeat, natural ambience and running water – perhaps an echo of a train passing by the Rhine. Repetition is not merely repeating here; repetition is an instrument for crafting a ghostly claustrophobia with a family of phrases and tones, environmental presence and electronics.
S’accommoder’s closing track ‘A focus on colours’ is a woozydistillation of everything that has come before it, but one now blushed with hope. Ambient layers, choral fragments and subdued percussive loops organically form a bucolic aural patchwork, culminating in the return of a guitar signalling the end of Ryefield Society’s stirring suite.
Perdido
After a trip down lesser-known pathways, we pause at ‘Caíndo’, an introduction to James A. McDermid’s side and a seamless bridge between the two EPs. Caíndo feels like a fallen spirit bathing in a slow wash of anxiety. Perdido’s opening track spotlights McDermid’s archaeology of the psyche and skill at sculpting places of absence, of emotion and a desire to search from within.
A beautiful rise and fall of breath exists within Perdido’s six tracks. ‘Notes of sadness and resignation’ almost seems to gasp for air after the prologue, exhaling with a particular poignancy as a soliloquy slow dances between intimate picked acoustic guitar and mournful violin. Although the words shared are in French, a sensitive sense of contemplation and of the bittersweet is formed. A single sigh, a gentle laugh, says so much.
Deep feelings of melancholia endure throughout ‘Sunprints’, almost as if the special something we are all striving to find in life is just out of reach, despite our best efforts. But like the never-ending horizon that seems to always have the strength to hold up a vast, weeping sky, the track’s developing, sensitive strings offers up a glimpse of hope. The emotional release of Sunprints leaves an affecting impression like a rediscovered handwritten letter which had been left on a windowsill to fade in the sun.
The Perdido EP shines gently as a confessional document retold as a reverie. Characters we glimpse throughout can be imagined, their worries felt, the sights they see pictured. The minute-long title track, a spoken word vignette over cello drones and captured room tone, empathises with the sorrow of the soul, the admissions of loss and feelings of being misunderstood.
In ‘Acordo do meu sonho’ we hear the sea and feel a passing breeze of drifting, minimalist piano and string resonance, which in phases recalls the haunting loops of Basinski. This piece feels as if it is soundtracking the moment in a waking dream when sunlight breaks through a dense blanket of cloud and one can feel a warm glow dancing across the face, as our shadow follows us along a remote beach.
This leads into the EP’s 9-minute closing piece ‘This sorrow that lifts me up’, a cautiously epic final act to James’ sensitive body of work. Perhaps named after an anthology of Portuguese poet Florbela Espanca’s work – Fernando Pessoa’s ‘twin soul’ – this final act alternates between feelings of desperate longingand a yearning for life. A sustained showcase of sighing strings, sombre drone, scraped harmonics and swirling space, it combines beauty with the atonal and invokes mono no aware – the pathos of things.
Listening to the soul of a city
If S’accommoder is a walk around a misty neighbourhood at sunup with obscured reflections of the city appearing in puddles and passing train windows, Perdido is an autumnal afternoon where hazy sun is trying to break through to warm the chill in the air.
We can imagine sitting in cafés on the corner of cobbled streets where sorrowful melodies of a nearby Fado singer drift through. Or pausing on a stone bridge while listening to church bells and watching birds perch on wires over a railway line. Are we experiencing a waking reality or flashbacks to other people’s lives? There are only hints of the concrete amongst the abstract.
Both EPs delve into the sensitivity of these conscious cities, where sound functions as a dérive carrying the listener on the shadows of locals living out their daily lives. Is it the heart and soul of whispering places that we hear; the echoes of memories reverberating off quiet side streets and squares? This effect is psychogeographic – showing how the spirit of places make us feel and behave.
S’accommoder and Perdido inhabit nostalgic and wistful spaces shaped by the personal experiences of both artists. What connects the sonic dots is an attention to texture and small, shifting moments and permitting them enough space to breathe. The synergy of themes means this release, despite being two EPs, clicks as a rewarding collected experience and encourages us to contemplate our own connections to local space.
Although the release can appear to be a lament, it travels to places where catharsis is felt at certain points along the way. There may be a lingering sense of longing and loss, but there is also a desire to endure. To continue the search, to be free. Sometimes one has to fall down – or get lost – in order to wake up and find oneself again.
S’accommoder | Perdido is released through rohs! records on Bandcamp on (CD and digital).
Ryan Hooper
MEANS 