maurice & charles is side project from roy ‘freelance hellraiser‘ kerr, and george ‘cunning folk‘ hoyle (who came to prominence while playing bass for gay dad), so with that kind of history you know that whatever these two conjure up in their studio is going to sound brilliant.
[it should be noted that prior to this team up, they have worked before – george helped craft one of the best tracks that freelance hellraiser released : b-side to ‘we don’t belong‘, a mighty 10 minutes of digital noise and epic guitars that was ‘a punk rock version of god‘, a track that still damages the ireallylovemusic soundsystem on a regular basis.]
the 2011 debut release by maurice & charles, ‘moroder in milan‘, did exactly as the title suggested it would, combined a love for balearic disco and moroder production with 8 minutes of a big fat bassline, acid sqiggles, loose rhythms, and a vocal loop all about summer. the track became embedded within andrew weatheralls dj sets at the time, thus confirming its status.
now, a decade later, the duo have decided it’s time to head back to the source, and have found some time out from their days jobs (pop producer for roy, folk guru for george), and crafted two new slices of epic dancefloor fillers that sonically recall the epic 12″ remixes by the guv’nor.
the two tracks on offer so far sound like they reference each other in their core melody, but the instrumentation is somewhat different in each variation.
primal window has guitars (acoustic and psych noise), hand claps, a glammed up beat and is the more urgent of the two tracks, whereas tomorrow thinking is more spaced out and laid back, sort of.
just as you begin to think it’s a blissed out soundtrack for sunrise euphoria with bongo’d ambience, after a couple of minutes the bass line lets loose followed by a harsh horn/sax sample loop and a lot of extra sonic layers of percussion, creating a very dramatic sonic intensity before everything cuts away to allow the final section to calm the nerves.
absolutely fantastic stuff, let’s just hope they get around to sorting out an album before 2031.
more detail : maurice & charles bandcamp