Palmbomen II

Kai Hugo said he conceptualised this alias, and album, while watching X-Files in his mother’s attic in Amsterdam in the early 2010s… and it sounds like it. Everything here is eerie and wrong, it’s acid house and 80s soul/pop viewed through the wrong end of a dirty telescope, hazy memories of being a 90s teenager dreaming of aliens and raves. It came right in the middle of an explosion of “outsider house” where dozens of people were making a name with detuned synths, cassette hiss and retro weirdness – but it stands absolutely alone among the generic, thanks in part to a natural facility for spooky melody, but also because it’s not just about signifiers, it’s genuinely very weird and emotional.