Butterfly Crush

Those who know a little about the small town of Moira in County Down may have thought it marginally less likely than Afghanistan under the Taliban to emerge as a source of music as remarkable as this - a single that, in its effluence of disconcerting electronic weirdness, strikingly captures the mischievous mood at riotous play in the early designs of, say, The Human League and Cabaret Voltaire. In the words of Milton’s Comus, ‘How camest thou here, good Swain?’

For indeed, modest Moira is home ground for the Gore Infidel label and its proprietor Dave Swain, whose ‘Sportive’ augments a brittle hip-hop pulse with whorls of keyboard tones to set in motion a groove that’s both spaced-out and pensively sad. Onto this Swain projects a verbal montage of European and American women’s dating-agency discourse, with the word ‘sportive’ being the open sesame for those keyboards to enter short but extreme seizures of hallucinatory acid glare. It’s startling stuff, with the multi-tracked statement, ‘Do you know what love is? It’s two halves of the same whole’ being made to sound like an unpleasantly clinical endorsement of some monstrous yoking of the self.

The 7” is also graced with a compelling downbeat pop song in the form of ‘Goodnight America (Radio Edit).’ Here, over a mellow balsam rhythm track of bass contentment and a light, constant rain of tingling guitar, Swain’s low and singular voice delivers a wry and thoughtful lyric which centres on the rejection of spectacle-saturated American culture. ‘A Northern Irish Stephin Merritt singing from the Cathal Coughlan songbook whilst fronting a more sparse and serious Saint Etienne’ may be the description that comes closest to the song’s overall effect.