Premiere: Simon Crab – Invisible City

Music

The Bourbonese Qualk founder shares his third album under his own name through Leeds imprint Space Ritual.

This place was unlike anything she’d ever seen before. Small white houses lined the winding streets, glimmering beneath the sun, and the city’s inhabitants exuded joy, welcoming everyone with open arms. It was like something from a postcard or a fairy tale story. She’d envisaged somewhere like this in her mind, in many of her dreams too, but she never thought she could reach out and touch it. It had always been housed in her imagination; an invisible entity but now it was tangible – it truly existed.

As a founding member of Bourbonese Qualk, Simon Crab has long explored sounds from the fringes, whether that’s in the electronic world or the spaces between new wave, industrial, electro, dub and post-rock, among others. After the disbanding of the group and a couple of long players under his own name, Crab took some time away from releasing music, until now.

Invisible Cities marks his third solo album and finds its home in the safe hands of Leeds imprint Space Ritual. Recorded last year at his studio in Hastings, with extra percussion and vocals from Fritz Catlin, David J Smith and Ksenia Sadovski, the compositions echo his formative influences and explorations from ambient, dub, experimental, soundtrack, new wave and more.