Delmer Darion

The thin edge of December has withered into the same strange certainty of another year. And among the swarms of new beginnings, West Midlands-born and London-based experimental electronic/producer duo Delmer Darion – comprising Tom Lenton and Oliver Jack – announce their return with ‘First Photograph of the Nebula in Orion’, the new single featuring journeyed Chicago-by-Ohio songwriter Spencer Radcliffe and experimental artist Martha Skye Murphy.

“The song is a response to the photograph it’s named after,” explains Lenton, “which was captured by an amateur astronomer named Henry Draper in 1880. I was reading about how dry photographic plates work. That got me thinking about how it feels to remember someone that’s been out of your life for a long time. So it’s partly ekphrasis and partly about piecing memories together.”

Sonically, it's a detour from the band’s breakthrough debut album Morning Pageants from 2020, which was said to feel “for all the world like one of those rare underground paradigm shifts in electronic music” by Electronic Sound Magazine. Their archival instincts remain at the apex of ‘First Photograph of the Nebula in Orion’, but the structure builds steadily - an unnerving climb into a century-old story told as richly as if it had happened this morning.

The song is best heard as two long-lost parts sutured together. The first leans into the dusty alt-folk that hangs over Morning Pageants: Radcliffe’s over-awed croak dances with one of the most beautiful, slow-burning melodies the band has written.

“I first heard Spencer’s album ‘Hot Spring’ at the beginning of the pandemic,” says Lenton of working with Radcliffe, “it’s comfortably my most played album over that period. We wanted to guard against the track sounding melodramatic; Spencer’s voice is so beautifully earnest and kind, we thought he’d be perfect for it.”

London artist Martha Skye Murphy then lends her signature histrionic interjections to the second part, her spectral vocal exploring the incalculable worlds that Draper’s photograph exposed for the first time. Wraithlike cacophonies spiral around an improvised response to the first part, recorded in one take on a broken pipe organ at St. Peter’s Church in Jack’s childhood village, Bourton-on-Dunsmore.

As with Morning Pageants, the artwork for ‘First Photograph…’ is beguiling, again designed by Jack. “It’s an acrylic on canvas painting, 200x200mm, which is based on the photograph the song is named after,” he explains. “Multiple layers of paint were applied using a palette knife, allowed to dry, and then selectively scraped back to canvas. The layers built up to create a varied impasto texture.”

‘First Photograph of the Nebula in Orion ft. Spencer Radcliffe’ is released today, 19 January 2023 by Practise Music.