Inhabiting the same unpredictable terrain of The Aliens and The Super Furry Animals, Luke Insect has subtly drawn from a host of eclectic voices to shape his own highly distinctive sound. Like the best psyche-folk, it is music that exudes a sense of bizarre possibility; a world in which Ken Loach meets Damo Suzuki, where The Beta Band collide with Dario Argento. The results are irresistibly fascinating.
As the ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ unearthliness of this single attests, there is certainly a strong vein of English psychedelia in The Laughing Windows. Luke Insect’s parents were friends of Syd Barrett in the Cambridge days and later London freak out days when musicians were searching the nations’ musical past for surreal characters and images. The Laughing Windows create music that registers strongly on a psychological level they are reaching for images of a lost England, be it in glimpses from the strange and elliptical folk-past or documents of 60s working-class London. This brings an intriguing and rare power to the music. The effect is to produce imagery that seems at once disarmingly familiar and supernaturally strange.
