A Sense of Falling: Strange Geometry Outtakes
The Clientele
EP

April 2016
POINT029
Tracks

Breathe In Now / Losing Haringey (Instrumental) / One Hundred Leaves / Since We Last Spoke / Spanish Night / When I Came Through
To coincide with The Clientele's Strange Geometry album being reissued on vinyl by Merge in USA, The Clientele release 6 previously unavailable tracks from the Strange Geometry album sessions compiled as a digital EP. Singer songwriter Alasdair MacLean wrote of the bonus material:

All six of these tracks are outtakes from the July 2005 Strange Geometry sessions at Bark Studios in London. Breathe In Now is one of my favourite Clientele songs. I wanted it to have a baroque string arrangement but there was no time to put one together, so it was dropped. Spanish Night was written in Valencia. It was too hot to sleep at night, so I ended up staying up at night and sleeping all day, when, as it turned out, it was too hot to sleep. Since We Last Spoke was abandoned halfway through for reasons now unclear, though I still like the lyrical image of Nero appearing in a crowd. Apparently, Emperor Nero mixed among crowds in disguise, listening to other people s conversations. One Hundred Leaves was a fan favourite and used to be a staple of our live shows, but we couldnt quite get the live feel down on tape at Bark. When I Came Through is a fragment, forgotten until now, a dream of walking home from the railway station to the garden.

The Clientele


The Clientele formed a long time ago in the backwoods of suburban Hampshire, playing together as kids at school, rehearsing in a thatched cottage remote from any kind of music scene, but hypnotised by the magical strangeness of Galaxie 500 and Felt, and the psych pop of Love and the Zombies. During a pub conversation the band collectively voted that it was OK to be influenced by Surrealist poetry but not OK to have any shouting or blues guitar solos. From that moment on they put their stamp on a kind of eerie, distanced pure pop, stripped to its essentials and recorded quickly to 4 track analogue tape.

These recordings were released as lovingly packaged 7 singles at the tail-end of the 90s, and compiled as the millennium ended into the debut album, Suburban Light, now hailed as one of the finest records of the decade. From the faded pop art of Suburban Light came a move into the fog with the 2nd LP, The Violet Hour, released in 2003. An attempt to create a deeper, more mysterious sound, it was an archetypal Clientele record: hypnotic, self-enclosed, meticulously creating its own world.

The Clientele re-invented their music with Strange Geometry (2005) and God Save the Clientele (2007); Brian O Shaughnessy (My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream) and Mark Nevers produced, and El Records legend Louis Philippe provided typically gorgeous string arrangements. The sound was bigger, brighter, and clearer, MacLean s ringing, classically-influenced guitar style and James Hornsey s melodic bass combining to create a different kind of depth and atmosphere for the newly sparkling songs, which now came complete with crossover appeal; incongruously, one of them even featured in the Keanu Reeves / Sandra Bullock weepie, "The Lake House".

Bonfires on the Heath (2009) is in a sense a return to the Clienteles roots; the dreamlike suburban landscapes first encountered in the early singles, their trippy sense of menace stronger now. Back in London, theyve drawn on older traditions of English folk, which exist here side-by-side with the band's more familiar bossa and pop elements, creating a timeless eeriness. Its often said the best bands create their own sound; the Clientele have gone one further and created an entire world.
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