And now for a more currently released entry — well, this one from May of this year. Electronic musician and producer Chris Gilbert has been releasing music under the Mild Peril umbrella for 10-15 years now, using that name a variety of other pseudonyms (Paladin, Cosmic Angst, Body Party and Molasar to name a few) to release what is referred to as cosmic disco (or more light-heartedly, wizard disco) — his own personal amalgamation of music from a variety of genres including italo disco, lush 80s-decade European dance music, EBM, Berlin-school electronics and with other elements pulled in from psychedelic space rock, mystic folk, and even non-musical influences such as mythology, astrology, medieval folklore and to some degree, science fiction.
In addition to this entry being a first for a current, recent release, I’ve also interacted with Chris personally during my time living in London over a decade ago. From the mid-2000s and the ten years that followed, Chris activitely promoted and DJ-ed a number of popular club nights in what might loosely be described as the “East London synth/EBM scene”, with these nights working in a number of genres including the well-attended Endurance club night that ran for about five years, focusing on classic minimal EBM, Belgian new beat and related sounds with a collection of DJs from that scene that rotated behind the decks in sweaty basement venues from Shoreditch to Stoke Newington.
Other club ventures included Future Brain, with a focus on darker, spacier italo disco, and Brain Waves, which had a more broader range of music working under the general “synth” umbrella, but with a familiar feel to the other two aforementioned club nights.
For a brief period we had played music together in the short-lived band Savage Furs — active for just two years from 2009 — which I can only as “surreal, experimental post-punk”, pulling in influences from new wave, synth pop, art pop and psychedelic rock through into a strange collection of tracks. Even listening to those tracks today I can’t pinpoint what sound we were trying to go for but am aware of the broad, obscure and abstract inspirations that were brought in creatively into the production process. In the end that band only put out one official release, a 12″ EP released in 2011 that also contained a remix of one of the tracks, “Sick Lamborghini”, done by Gilbert himself under the Chris Flatline moniker and reworks that track into a driving, EBM-directed club entry.
In recent years Gilbert’s flagship work has been done under the name of Paladin, whose latest release, Body Cosmic, to me has a noticeably more “beefier” feel, with the synth work well-crafted along with nice counterpoint between the various synth lines weaving around each other. This is possibly due to expanded instruments in the studio but also likely due to a musician fine-tuning his craft. There’s perhaps also more sound design that one might associate with electronic music that was coming out in the late 1980s and early 1990s as electronic music at that time was more sculpting itself with more euphoria and lushness in light of the emerging rave culture happening around that time.
These evolving sounds in his recent work are crafted tastefully and shows a great understanding of the underlying feel that artists working with those styles at the time with emerging technology. The track “Ascending” stands out here, showcasing some of Paladin‘s (and indeed Mild Peril‘s) great application of overlapping, polyrhythmic synth work that often works in repetitions out of the usual four-count sequencing associated with programmed electronic music, all connected into a firm, driving beat. “Ascending”, in addition to being a track on this Body Cosmic release, was also included in a compilation called Unknown Prospect Vol. 1 (as shown in the video for this track) on the Berlin-based electronic label Second Sight, which saw a vinyl release that came out a short while before Body Cosmic, and includes other artists such as Zanias and Gewaltem.
The video that accompanies the release’s title track “Body Cosmic” features segments from the popular 1980s TV series Robin Of Sherwood, which I’m sure Gilbert acknowledges as a close, kindred visual representation of the aesthestics and moods that drive the backbone of his Mild Peril output, especially his work as Paladin. You can view this below.
Overall for me there’s a meditative feel to the overarching Mild Peril output, and tends to be music I gravitate to a bit more when I’m looking music to get a bit emersed into, without feeling completely overrun by it — if that makes any sense. It’s great music to accompany a road trip in the British Isles, at least for me anyway.
This entry, unlike others I’ve cooked up more recently, is with less of a massive back story, perhaps as Gilbert himself is an avid documentarian and archivist, where his output in those departments speak more about his music than I could ever summarize. His extensive catalogue of mixes through through Mixcloud attest to this, covering a wide variety of genres and themes that give insight to his avid love of music and what inspires him. There’s a wealth of information and media at the mild-peril.co.uk website.