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Having grown up on the Cape flats of South Africa, Alan Abrahams moved to London at the end of the 1990s and began producing music there. Within quite a short time, he had made a name for himself with his project Portable, and later as Bodycode, as an exquisite producer of experimental electronica, techno and house – often rooted in deep house. Abrahams has released on such renowned labels as Background, ~scape, Perlon, !K7, Dial and Ghostly International. A Portable album also bears his name.

After stints in Lisbon and Berlin, he now lives in Paris, where he also runs the Khoikhoi label – named after the indigenous population of southern Africa (today's republics of South Africa and Namibia).

With Ascend, Alan Abrahams opens the field wide open towards pop. A very mature form of pop music, one could call it ethereal sophisticated pop. He was already no stranger to vocals in his more club-orientated productions, and he has often demonstrated his songwriting skills. Here they take centre stage.

The first track It's A Fragile Space sets the mood for the entire album: beats from a reduced arsenal of complementary percussive sounds upon which other instruments are densely layered – yet never glued together – with epic keyboards, a fretless bass, a strumming pop guitar and, above all, Abrahams’ warm voice, which he layers in beautiful choirs. It is a lush, urban, soul-jazzy kind of contemporary pop with a wistfully melancholic undertone.

In the title track Ascend, a piano plays in a minor key to a sample that suggests something between a boat rowing and the heavy turning of pages. Abrahams enters into a multi-voiced dialogue with himself, the synthesiser pads, harmonics on the guitar and swelling and subsiding horns depict a vastness. On the horizon a sound like a whirring Polaroid camera and sharp typewriter-like percussion tell the story: "it's not the end / just a twist in the bend / doors might close / but dreams ascend".

It Is begins like a 1970s Marvin Gaye track and then dances explicitly into the electronic present. The Greasy Pole is pure melodrama: "down and down I fall / the greasy pole" is accompanied by mournful violins to the melodious beat of a CR78. It continues elegiacally: "once I had a name / now I am a no-one" reflects Abrahams in I Used To Be – cars brake, dogs bark. In To Your Love, the instruments drone and pull a little, while a trombone motif makes the rounds. A lonesome horn features in Take Me Home, at the end of the album: "take me home / take me home" – but where was that again?

Ascend is the music of a traveller, music of an internationalist urbanity that cannot be pinned down to one city, one country, one continent; an urban internationalism that cannot be pinned down to one time, but whose starting point is the here and now: "bits and bytes in a digital sea / random access memory". Perhaps it really is the case, as in the film The Last City, that all cities eventually become one and our travels never mark an arrival, but always a continuation.

Ascend is a very personal, poetic album. One can even read the song titles as a poem:

It's A Fragile Space 
Terminus
Try
Ascend
You And I
It Is
The Greasy Pole
I Used To Be To Your Love
Take Me Home

But the personal speaks to a universal feeling, speaks of our being lost, of a certain loneliness in this world, between the cities, between the times. It speaks of our longing for something like a “home” – which we may translate as closeness, friendship, trust or a sense of belonging.

At the foundation of Ascend is a somewhat slow, sometimes interrupted, straight bass drum: "tick-tock" – it sounds soft, it's on the move, restless, but in a pleasant way, evoking continuity. The orchestral sounds, piano, strings, brass and woodwinds repeatedly build up into little moments of chamber music pop, embracing us. When Alan Abrahams multiplies his vocals into a choir, when he goes into call and response, he moulds multiple selves into a whole – yet never lets the melancholy fall into depression, maintaining a poised composure despite all emotionality. In its entirely, Ascend offers us the greatest consolation.

Text: Andreas Reihse