By: Si Forster
Contact | bandcamp |
Released on June 3, 2016 via Temporary Residence
Instrumentals are a funny breed. Without words, they have to create their own remit by finding the genre they want to appeal to and go for it, pushing against the walls if we’re lucky. For this, Contact’s first full-length collaborative record, there is a certain amount of genre conformity, although not necessarily in the one that we’ve been told that it nestles in.
We are informed that Zero Moment is “Cinematic synth-prog”, and to be fair it’s not that easy to argue with on the surface of it all. It’s also selling itself a bit short, parking itself in the confines of a furrow well-ploughed in the last couple of years. Truth be told, it’s a lot more than that.
Formed from a coming-together between Zombi drummer A.E. Paterra and British film composer Paul Lawler, Zero Moment sets its stall out pretty much right away. Or, to be more precise, exactly one minute into the opening title track when both musicians’ worlds collide perfectly and the “wow!” factor is immediate. The two artists play off each other perfectly all the way through the album, not so much giving each other a space to perform but allowing opportunity after opportunity to really go for it.
The “Synth-prog” aspect is never in doubt from start to finish; the synths are very self-evident throughout and their origins and influences are sometimes quite easy to place – certainly Pink Floyd’s Rick Wright and Genesis’ Tony Banks lurk all the way through the album’s seven tracks. Sometimes the influence is tonal from the choice of sound, sometimes it’s a melodic resonance and when both elements come together it’s an absolute joy.
But “Cinematic”? Hmm. This term lumps Zero Moment in with an awful lot of peers right now, and it’s a niche where they don’t particularly sit to their best advantage. Where they do fit is somewhere much more Televisual. This may sound like a lesser comparison, but it really isn’t – where everyone else is fighting over the same horror-synth mantle, Contact go straight for the adolescent imagination of the 1980s and evoke the era’s two mighty Jans (Hammer for the sonics and Michael Vincent for the visuals) for something a lot more immediate and downright fun.Zero Moment’s chief stock-in-trade is creating and representing as many exciting TV moments as humanly possible – every idea is punchy, cool and appeals directly to the very specific part of every grown-up’s brain that contains such joys as Airwolf, Manimal, Streethawk et al. This could only be more “of the moment” if they’d got Donald P Bellisario in to produce it.
Despite the longish songs – albeit positively zippy by prog standards – there is nothing wasted here. Each track is made up from many separate and almost disparate ideas that are carefully gathered together and ordered to ensure that each track works as a whole and that nothing at all is lost. This is where the collaborative force at Contact’s heart beats strongest; a creative co-operative that accepts everything and turns it into something more.
Listening to Zero Moment makes me nostalgic for everything I watched with such glee as a kid, and its retrofitted, powerchord bombast makes it sound as though both artists involved were doing this with huge grins on their faces. It’s perfect music for action sequences, snappy title screens and oh so many montages.
