Fast Asleep

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"Fast Asleep": a lovely contradiction in terms and a fine way to describe a record which, although it has little about it that is in any way "fast", is full of its own bizarre logic. Funki Porcini's fourth LP is occasionally so downbeat that its pulse seems to have stopped altogether, so ambient that in parts it seems to vanish into the atmosphere, leaving nothing but a few traces of distant sounds fading away like smoke. This bewildering, baffling, bizarre and quietly brilliant record has the logic of a dream, full of unexpected connections and strange, funny and slightly disturbing non-sequiturs. One moment you're taking a train across Japan ("Tokyosaka Train") and the next you're listening to a typically grim British weather forecast ("Terminal C3 UK"), voices and sounds slightly warped in a way that brings to mind Chris Morris' "Blue Jam". If this record is a dream then it's a dream from a David Lynch film, not the "dreams" of usual pop music mythology: dreams here aren't psychedelic washes or wish fulfilment exercises but a dredging of the sonic gloop lodged somewhere deep in our psyches (and record collections).

"Fast Asleep" is divided into 14 tracks, many of them having little coherence or development, beats and samples and textures fading in and out, shifting from distant voices to weird cocktail lounge organ ("We're Out of Here") to dark Howie B-esque downtempo mood pieces ("The Great Drive By") to the light tiny piano and trumpet interludes of "Last Night Over Norway" and "Sleepy". Without poring over the display of your CD player, it's often difficult to know where one track ends and the next begins. It reminds me of a trip hop (whoops! I said it! ...though there isn't really much "hop" here) version of the good old Orb - church bells, passing cars, sleepy voices transmitting in from a distant planet, or even of DJ Shadow having smoked a hell of a lot more and being a lot less interested in showing off his record collection and scratching skills, packing it in and falling asleep. When occasionally some beats do appear (the frantic jazz drumming that kicks in five minutes into "The Big Sea" or the shifting beats on "Weow" for example), it wakes you up with a shock - you find yourself lying on your sofa not really sure where you are for a moment.

"Fast Asleep" comes with a DVD featuring films to accompany several of the tracks as well as the videos for "Atomic Kitchen" and "Ritmo di Jazz" produced in conjunction with the excellently named Team Alcohol. Again, images here fade in and out of vision, the world morphs into a flower then into a dandelion which distributes its seeds in "What Are You Looking At?", while "The Great Drive By" takes us on a ride through what looks to be a dark tunnel then turns out to be a drainpipe. It's interesting, moody stuff, but with sound this good you'd be better to let the images form in your head before checking out the DVD.

Rather than the box marked "classics", "Fast Asleep" is probably something that will end up in the box marked "great historical curios". But that's a pretty fine place to be too.