Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

Nostalgia is incompatible with creativity, as the long list of rock music casualties performing reunion concerts or greatest hits gigs attests to. In electronic music, it isn’t as prevalent, mainly because the most talented producers seek to make the most futuristic music possible, but nonetheless, the endless quest for advancement still acknowledges past glories.
Modern minimal techno is in part influenced by the legacy of ‘90s US producers Rob Hood and Dan Bell, while contemporary electro – not the electro house nonsense – would mean little without the melodies of ‘80s Italo or the a Detroit 808. However, these styles have nothing on the lengths that Vector Lovers, a.k.a. UK producer Martin Wheeler, has gone to for his new album, Afterglow.
Vector Lovers were responsible for the shimmering, melodic ‘Roboto Ashido Funk’ and ‘Suicide Android’ singles, as well as two marvellously introspective, at times isolationist albums, Vector Lovers and Capsule For One, but he’s changed tack for his third long-player.
The Manga cartoons that adorned Wheeler’s previous releases have been replaced by a photograph of the producer as a six-year-old, standing in a field at sundown with some of his school friends. The cover art could just be the producer taking a trip down memory lane, but Martin repeats his reverence for the past throughout the album.
Based in part on some of his first recording sessions from the late ‘80s – in his bedroom at his parents’ house – the result is a dancefloor-shy twelve-tracker with a refreshingly organic, evocative sound.
“Seeing as I raided the past for a photograph, I also raided my studio for old samples, and you could say that it’s taken me ages, nearly 20 years, to make this scrapbook of an album,” Martin explains, still in good form despite having spent a weekend touring. “Some of the tracks were recorded in my parents’ house when I was just 17 and they ended up sitting on a shelf, the other tracks were done pretty quickly, but overall, it has a nostalgic feeling.”
Is there a danger that Wheeler could be perceived as trading on former glories because he has no new ideas?
“This album is my most personal release so far, it’s backward-looking, but nostalgia is an attractive quality,” he counters.
“Maybe it’s because music is in a state of flux, but I’m not so sure it’s a better time to be making music. Until the mid-’80s, it was still possible to do things that would be considered revolutionary and that would get you on the news, but it's been turned into a celebrity-fest and what constitutes the underground has become more sprawling and fragmented than ever before.
“It's also become so much easier to make and release music – you can emulate the sound of a proper studio using just software and I’m sure that in 10 years time, music will be made according to the producer’s mood,” he continues, sounding like a bona fide futurologist.
“The producer will give the software some basic parameters and it will programme and record the track according to those moods and guidelines.”
It’s not just the state of music that Martin is less than enamoured with: he thinks that the world is about to enter one of its darkest periods and he’d rather savour his happy memories than document the bad news ahead.
“The techno idea of looking into the future isn’t as attractive any more,” he ventures. “It’s mainly due to a fear of what may happen: there's a lot of bad stuff on the horizon – climate change, global terrorism and the nuclear threat returning – but maybe the world was always like that and I never noticed. I grew up with Star Wars, which had a very positive portrayal of technology: although we have advanced so much, I still feel a bit disappointed that we’re still stuck on earth and despite all the technology, I’m nostalgic for the space age that never happened.”
Despite Wheeler’s hi-tech background – he used to be a computer games designer before he started making music full-time – there's also a distinctly pastoral feeling to the album, typified by the sprawling epic ‘A Field’. Radically different to any other Vector Lovers release, it’s Wheeler’s attempt to “sound different to all the homogenous, software-based music out there.” Is it also an attempt to provide a soundtrack for a rural utopia that Wheeler will establish once the oil-dependent globalised economy crashes and burns?
“No, I don’t have any plans to start a commune just yet, if that’s what you mean,” he laughs, “but I need to get out of the city for a few days soon.”
Maybe he’ll just venture again to the lush fields that feature on the cover art and listen to Afterglow at full blast.

Afterglow is out now on Soma