ELLIOT Gray found what he had been searching for. Once a hipster musician in the city, he exiles himself in an East Ayrshire village and one day walks until all he can hear is “the wind in the trees, and the deep silence underneath”. The next day he sells all his instruments, realising that he didn’t “want to take part in the cacophony any more”.
So goes the spoken-word title track of Offline:Offgrid, the first full album of Looper material since 2002’s The Snare. Gray’s story has resonance with that of his creator, Stuart David, and its themes of escape and the need for quiet are central to an album at once meticulously restrained, complex and highly personal.
Having left Glasgow shortly after the release of The Snare, Belle and Sebastian co-founder David and his artist wife Karn – who formed Looper as an art/music project in the late 1990s – moved to Dundee a few years later. The property they bought turned out to be what David describes as “an insane frat hall” which affected the novelist’s sleep so badly he developed an illness from which he has not fully recovered.
“I think fibromyalgia is the closest set of symptoms I’ve seen that fit it,” says David, referring to the life-changing, multi-system condition which continues to elude conventional treatment. “‘Terror flu’ I used to call it, but it’s not as bad as that now. I’m still not well enough to be able to play live. Or go the shops most days. But one day I’d like to be able to do an acoustic show of the old Looper songs, and there are definitely songs from Offgrid:Offline I’d like to play that way.”
Elliot Gray isn’t a character from David’s fiction writing of the past 10 years but is instead inspired by Somerset Maugham’s The Fall Of Edward Barnard, a story, he says about “finding a place where you want to be and giving up on all the other things you thought you should be doing, an idea that was really appealing to me at the time”.
Though there were only a couple of years when he was too ill to write music, returning was not easy. But rather than a laborious listen, Offgrid:Offline’s melodies gleam and sparkle, its narrative arc formed with a deft, if shaky, hand.
Two of the most affecting tracks address issues rarely discussed: grief at the altered identity chronic illness often forces upon an individual (I’m A Photograph) and, in Images Of The Shipwreck, how it can sap creativity. Elsewhere is the glorious Farfisa Song, a few minutes of colourful, pitch-perfect pop. The National hopes the single was as fun to record as it is to listen to.
“I’m glad it comes across like that, but it was far from the truth,” David says. “It was me sitting at a computer for 15 minutes a day, which is all I was able to work. But then as the songs were finished I’d listen to them and it didn’t sound to me like they’d been made by someone who didn’t exist. They didn’t even sound to me like they’d been made by an ill person.”
In a way it’s a blessing that David finds it strange to look back on that period. And perhaps Offgrid:Offline feels like an exorcism he’s now happy to set free. The album was originally released as a download with Looper’s unconventional 2015 boxset These Things. The gorgeous, electric blue vinyl includes a download of three previously unreleased tracks and Karn’s distinct artwork.
“The basis of the work is a map of Ayrshire, close to where the title track of the album is set, and I had this photo taken at an angle, offgrid – it just seemed to fit,” Karn says.
The back cover image features fractured geometric shapes, elements of something still to coalesce.
She explains: “I liked that it looked like a half-formed idea on the studio desk, something struggling to work itself out. That chimed with the content of Stuart’s songs for me, with what I knew he was going through in real life.
“Stuart takes things from real life and makes them into fiction, then I give them another shot in another world as real objects again – I just realised that’s a loop.”
“Karn’s artwork is brilliant, and grouping the tracks together in that way feels as if we’ve tidied up our past, says David, referring to the boxset, though the same is maybe true of his feelings towards the album. It gives you a nice, clear feeling in your head, like having put your lands in order, and now it feels like we can choose whether to just stop or carry on with something entirely new.”
Offgrid:Offline is out on limited edition vinyl on Mute on May 12 www.facebook.com/looperama
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