A Happy Return - Drashel LP

Gatefold sleeve with booklet 

Music by Mathew Fowler
with Aimée Henderson and
our daughter Agnes Bell.
Additional dictaphone recordings of
St Peter Mancroft church choir, Norwich,
and school children on a Munich train.

Recorded to cassette at home
on Saint Philips Road, Norwich.

Kindly mixed by Kevin Cormack
and mastered by Taz Mattar.

Paintings by Aimée Henderson.

Love and thanks to friends and family.
Inspiration and courage from
Kevin Cormack, Matt Hunt, Markus Acher,
Stuart Goodman, Mel Gooding,
Cecil Collins, Julian of Norwich
and Aimée.

All Night Flight Records:

A second world-in-a-grain-of-sand LP of domestic cosmic from A Happy Return on the cult Spillage Fete label.

When I was a kid I always daydreamed about scale. What if the cracks in the path were river valleys? What if the stains on the skirting board were a mural? What if the dust under my bed contained multitudes? A Happy Return manage the same disorientating imaginary shifts in point of view on this second record. Something tells me we are definitely at home here, on an epic journey around a back bedroom, passing practice amps like blocks of flats and microphone stands like mobile masts. Sometimes the music operates at the usual spillage fete scale. There are minute-and-a-half-long miniatures that seem to hold more unhurried melodic invention that their scant running time can possibly contain. And sometimes when that melody disappears we are pitched right into the warp and weft of the carpet. If you need clues add to what the record actually sounds like I guess the first two Deux Filles records or Plinth’s Winter Songs might get you close. But when you’re trying to hold infinity in the palm of your hand who cares?