News: Jack Cheshire finally launches his excellent ‘Fractal Future Plays’ album with a gig and a live stream

JACK CHESHIRE is a voyage in the best traditions of a very British strain of pastorally inflected psychedelia who, by some as-yet unexplained quirk of the space-time continuum, isn’t as yet a leading household name for lovers of beautiful and mysterious, graceful rock; but then, if we investigate some of the theories underpinning his cracking latest album, Fractal Future Plays, he also actually is, simultaneously, in some other iterative, quantum version of things. Which almost kinda makes it alright.

Fractal Future Plays actually came out, yikes, a year ago in your Earth time; but because of, sigh, you know how it’s been, delay after delay after delay means Jack will actually be officially, fleshworld launching the record with a show at Paper Dress Vintage, Mare Street, on the eve of Friday, December 10th, and ignore any previously circulating material quoting the 9th, this is now the confirmed date. Be there or be less musically weird than you ought.

Inspired by concepts of the multiverse, time corridors, the astral plane and the dystopian rabbit hole that society seems to have headed down, that long-player is Jack’s fifth.

We’re on record as saying: “Imagine, if you will, say, MGMT if they had spent less time in a brightly acid glimmer and maybe a little more stoned in summer hayfields. It’s not Robert Crumb melting-head psychedelic, like The Flaming Lips or The Red Krayola; it’s more in a fine line of bands who admit the psych to their blend, admire its cosmic clear sight rather than its sensual flood. Much if it has a song like “The Killing Moon” as a sort of buried deep script; the romance, the seduction, the perfume of the other just behind the flimsiest curtain.” And d’you know what? We stand by that. (Read our full review here.)

Jack said of the writing of, and the head state that informed the record: “I increasingly felt as though I was an extra in an extended episode of Black Mirror. The world was going toxic and strange and it stirred up lots of cerebral sediment for me.

“There was a sheen of unreality to it that made me realise how complacent I’d been and how naïve I was. I found myself joking with friends; ‘We’ve gone down a dystopian wormhole, it’s not supposed to be like this.’ It made me imagine multiple timelines playing out, fractals of various imagined or lost futures.

“Sometimes when I am halfway between sleep and consciousness, all the synapses in my brain have dilated and I am swimming through that eerie, distended time, I feel like I’m in touch with disparate moments from my life, different versions of myself; as if time is an accordion that has been completely compressed, and I am floating in every chamber simultaneously.

“In Fractal Future Plays I am trying to channel that. It is an album inspired by time and our journey through it.”

Need to hear some, mebs? But of course. Please to be involving your ears with the rather ace “Miradors”, a single at the time of release. It’s almost post-punk in its declamatory, slightly alien lyrical delivery; crisp, almost with that so-British-as-not-to-be enunciation of Ray Davies: “I am the fat controller / Walk the corridors blindly,” he narrates.

There’s talk of Tic-Tacs, sausage rolls, ghost flats; a kind of completely removed wonder at the absurdities of the everyday you also find in And The Native Hipsters’ “There Goes Concorde Again“.

Tickets for Jack’s album launch party in the flesh are available here; and the Facebook live stream of the event will be accessible here.

Jack Cheshire’s Fractal Future Plays is out now from Loose Tongue on digital download, highly limited CD, and limited tangerine vinyl; order yours here.

Follow Jack at his website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.