In terms of a modern musical fantasy it’s hard to beat the idea of sharing a house at one point with both Richard James (of Aphex Twin fame) and, Mr Squarepusher, Tom Jenkinson.
Aside from what one imagines was the extreme pleasure of listening to the noises emanating from their respective bedrooms as well as the odd extremely cool party invitation it’s also not unreasonable to suppose that with all that electronic testosterone being thrown about from such venerable artists that a little bit of stardust wouldn’t have fallen the way of the other housemates.
One such former house-sharer was Jonathon Hawk who under the name of Global Goon has a back catalogue that is testimony to the fact that life is never quite that simple. In fact back when in the day’s of Global Goon’s first album there was some confusion whether Global Goon wasn’t indeed the Aphex Twin under a new name. Any confusion that did exist however was pretty much dispelled with a few listens and the obvious realisation that whoever was doing it simply wasn’t up to the standard of any of James’s work and on first listen, Quones, superficially at least, comes over as yet a poor imitation of the worst of Richard James’s work.
However, with subsequent listens it’s a different story but boy does it take a long time to get there. That said it’s still not as tortuous a journey as coming to a definitive opinion as to the merits or otherwise of both the recent from Radiohead and PJ Harvey.
Most significantly though and Quones comes through on the rails to show itself as a notable improvement on Hawk’s previous works.
Starting with the opening track that familiar and undeniable complaint that it’s all easy listening and unimaginative continues to ring true as Quones fails to get going off to a good start. And in fact the greatest problem for the album is the slow speed with which it settles down beyond a comfort zone with a unremarkable muzak-like quality.
Perhaps it’s the case that Hawk would have been better of condensing all of this into a good four or five track EP but, whatever the format Quones does eventually demonstrate that the Global trajectory is upward.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
