Decadence and sophistication would drip off of Now You See Me, Now You Don’t if it wasn’t so airtight. It is so precise in intent and design that it appears almost minimalist despite its grand luxury. While artists like Heartworms and Twin Tribes have been aching towards a dance-infused goth revival for the past few years Marina Zispin brings the dance floor to the manor. The lessons learned from excellent separate careers in various strains of experimental electronica come together to offer a new vision of gothic music. One built around minimalism, tension, and electronic excellence.
While the project is a duo, the choice of name – Marina Zispin – presents their music as the work of a singular unit. It could fit within the lost synthpop of the eighties like Deux or Q Lazzarus, Marina Zispin existing as some long-forgotten Belgian minimal synth artist. In reality, it’s the work of two brilliant musicians, London experimental stalwart Bianca Scoutt and dark ambient specialist Martyn Reid. Yet it doesn’t feel as though what each brings is easily discernible. This is partially because Marina Zispin sounds very little like either musician’s previous projects. While those were rooted in ambience and soundscapes often either lush or oppressive, Zispin is instead a crystal clear slab of icy goth pop. It occasionally veers close to ambience, such as on the twinned tracks ‘Venus Decadence’ and ‘Venus Opulence’, but those tracks are closer to the uncanny pulse of Suicide than either artist’s previous mix of dreamy soundscapes and oppressive collages. Whilst Scoutt contributes the majority of vocals outside the occasional uber goth croon from Reid, such as on lead single ‘Tudors’, the sounds and production choices feel too disparate from either artist to single one out as the creative lead. It’s pointless to try and ponder whether it’s Scoutt or Reid behind the Detroit techno syncopation of ‘Deep Blue’ or the Cure like synth work on ‘Mimes Calling in The Dark’. From the first pulse of ‘death must come’ the individual artists fall away, and Marina Zispin is all that remains.
‘Remains’ is exactly the right word here because that’s what Scout and Reid are working with. The grave of eighties synth pop and darkwave is one of the more commonly plundered in contemporary music, but Zispin isn’t playing with skeletons but instead putting new rags on old bones. Like labelmate Nourished By Time the duo seem to operate from a polygenre approach. Sure, gloomy synth pop is the core, but there’s an unspoken complexity under the hood that drives the tracks forward past typical revivalism. That’s not to say the classic goth trappings aren’t here because they very much are, with tracks like ‘Piece of Mind’ and ‘Mimes Calling in The Dark’ offering the sort of darkwave excellence that could make tears rain across the dancefloor. But just as equally the core ideas of icy synths, occasional guitar twangs and ethereal vocals are torn apart and reconstructed. Opener ‘Death Must Come’ carries a techno lurch like Nosferatu emerging out of his tomb to find his castle converted into a rave, while the penultimate track ‘The Bells Time Will Tell’ gradually works its way up towards aching ebm-tinged synth pop. Yet the group’s most common move is to slow things down, Bianca’s ethereal vocals merging with light touch beats to create thick slices of haunted dream pop such as on ‘Tudors’ and the exquisite ‘Penthouse Samba’. While one of the band’s feet is in the grave their songwriting falls in line with some of the most exciting voices in modern pop. The likes of Astride Sonne, ML Buch, and Fine all seem to bear a kinship with Zispin’s haunted dreamscapes and minimalist approach.
That’s the kicker to the whole thing, just how sparse it can feel, often more minimal synth than synth-pop. But rather than creating the sense that something’s missing, Now You See Me, Now You Don’t is a record where nothing is hidden. For a genre often smothered in makeup and oblique imagery, Marina Zispin has succeeded in making a goth album that feels remarkably modern in its immediacy and complexity. That’s not to say the macabre decadence has faded away for cookie-cutter mood music, but rather that the layers of dust have been swept off, and, for the first time in a while, the surfaces seem to shine.
https://youtu.be/H3pfuo0Ftgo?si=eZ-9p9AeGf0JI4ur
