Submersion is a collection of re-compositions – a series of musical deep dives – by six of downtempo music’s most exciting emerging and established artists. It’s also a closing chapter to Île de Rêve, or an ‘island of dreams’, the audio-visual project from which Private Agenda’s debut album first emerged.
On Île de Rêve, the warm, yet beguiling allure of islands acted as a musical and visual reference for storytelling. Whilst that record was defined by a compositional minimalism, containing no featuring performances on it for instance, it was a project that was conceived as a conceptual canvas upon which other artists could draw.
Soon after the record’s release, the pair began to receive reflections of material from the record – reworks of parts of tracks, lists of emotive words and sketches from close contemporaries and regular collaborators.
As Private Agenda explain, “we started to receive these remarkable echoes of the album sent back to us, these interpretations of the material that were both rooted in the conceptual world we’d tried to create, but of a new world entirely as well. Submersion is just a selection of some of these echoes. As a collection it feels like both a farewell to a particular project but it also something entirely new”.
On Submersion, the idea of depth, immersion and the detailed layering of sound define these sonic explorations. Opening the collection are two London-based producers who feature as part of Lo Recordings’ ongoing Spaciousness project. Coral Sea’s take on‘Bounty’ is the sound of vast, engulfing waves; JQ’s Underwater Mix of ‘Sea Life’ is a beautifully melancholy reworking of the original, both captivating and compact. Downtempo duo Delac channel a lo-fi RnB sensibility on their rework of ‘Solitude’ before the psychedelic swoop of ‘Malanai Ascending’ from Seahawks which will be released as a lead single on 30 April 2021. Experimental two-piece Delmer Darion follow with a detailed deconstruction of ‘Dependency’, showcasing shades of a production style which made their own debut album one of 2020’s most intriguing and complete records on which Private Agenda themselves collaborated. To complete and close the collection, Lo Recordings’ musical and spiritual guide, Ocean Moon (aka Jon Tye)reworks P.S.R (or Point of Safe Return) – itself the closing track from their debut album – which drifts delicately into the deepest blue.