Sublime fantasy exotica by Memotone, leading on from an unexpected gem for Sähkö with a proper dream sequence RIYL Pekka Airaksinen, Eno & Byrne, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mike Cooper, Alice Coltrane, Jonquera

Among the UK’s shapeshifting best, Memotone’s music has long been in search of an elusive muse, variously resembling baroque druid folk, Japanese environmental ambient, modal jazz-fusion and radiophonic library music. It’s not hard to hear all the above inhabiting and enlivening ‘How was Your Life?’, a somewhat definitive opus in his decade-wide run of albums and work with everyone from Industrial Coast to Dimitry Evgrafov and Batu, the latter of whom he supplied sounds for their ‘Opal’ album. Prompted by the discovery and purchase of a Y2K guitar synthesiser, the Roland GR33, the album is largely derived from loose improvisations that were later chiseled and layered into steeply immersive, freeformed scenes that occur with the logic of an acid trip. sHe generates a truly remarkable spectra of sounds from the instrument, variously mimicking fretless bass, tabla, sitar and lapsteel strings with technical ingenuity placed at the service of painting bigger pictures. The result is a melting tapestry of lushly psychedelic suggestion, travelling between piquant tunings echoing Eno & Byrne on ‘Paradise Drips’ or ‘Forest Zone’, to shimmers of languid tropical jazz-fusion arced with beatific pads in ‘Glow in the Dark’, with a standout of shearing harmonics and curdled tunings like Pekka Airaksinen playing with Alice Coltrane on ‘Carved By the Moon’ and ‘Canteen Sandwich’, and shoring up in hallucinatory modal zones with ‘Walking Backwards’.