Audiopile Review: The second of two new releases from the always on-point World Of Echo imprint, this one a newly formed duo consisting of Jessica Higgins and Matthew Walkerdine, the latter of which is also the in-house sleeve designer for the label. The two are not unfamiliar to each other, both having played together in various outfits over the last handful of years, circling around imprints like Upset! The Rhythm and Tough Love, among several other bedroom labels. While their previous outings veered more towards a traditional indie rock/post-punk hybrid, Guests is a notable break from their previously established norms. A simplistic setup of various synths, drum machines and Higgins’ precious vocals, the duo work their way through this lightly lysergic set of impressionistic bedroom dream-pop. “I Wish I was Special” weaves a patchwork of fractured dub ambience, shambolic DIY twee, and time-out-of-space pop levitations, tagging the album with bits of fly-on-the-wall field recordings, rudimentary synths, and Higgins’ speak-sing vocal poetry. Sublime and deeply charming stuff. Edition of 300.

Guests are Jessica Higgins and Matthew Walkerdine of Glasgow, UK, both formerly of the bands Vital Idles and Mordwaffe. They have been closely tied with DIY music, art and publishing for over a decade. Using (amateur) electronics, singing, speaking and field recording they make songs which blend the rhythms of popular music and contemporary approaches to collage, sampling, improvisation and repetition. As inspired by film and art as they are the legacies of twee underground and avant garde experimentalism, their loose, domestically twinged compositions explore feelings, atmospheres and moments which are hard to articulate and the quite literal notion of being a “guest”.

“I wish I was special” is their debut record, and with it a chance taken to explore terrain not previously covered by their other groups. The ideology of DIY practice appears integral to these eleven compositions, side-stepping virtuosity in favour of instinct and impression, unafraid to press unknown buttons and walk head first into mistake, finding inspiration where convention might not otherwise allow one to tread. The results are confoundingly fresh, sharp-of-mind, and unusually intimate. There’s an obvious intelligence at play here, and no little humour of course, but crucially there’s also a sense of the personal, a first-thought/best-thought (auto)didacticism that celebrates shared understanding and implicit trust. What, ultimately, we might view as the fearlessness in radically being yourself around another. It’s an approach that draws some comparison with the private musings of Flaming Tunes, Idea Fire Company’s domestic electronics, or perhaps even Annea Lockwood’s framing of emotional connection within avant garde structures. More so, Guests represent a compelling continuation of DIY post-punk experimentation that values intuition over prowess, and with it guides the listener into unexpected spaces that somehow comfort as much as they challenge.