It’s 1 December, and the festive season is distantly hoving into view, the perfect time for another 5:4 Advent Calendar, featuring 25 days of sonic wonders, curiosities, trifles and delights.
The first of these baubles is Dance from a Distance, a miniature orchestral bit of fun from one of my favourite neo-Easy Listening popsters, C Duncan. It was realised in 2020, while the Covid-19 pandemic was getting into its stride, and was put together – literally – from a myriad fragments recorded remotely by members of the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
i’ve written about C Duncan’s music on several occasions previously, always within the context of my Best Albums of the Years (in 2015, 2016 and 2019), and have been consistently impressed by the way he embraces various light music and pop stylings and weaves them into his own uniquely dreamy kind of songwriting. They feel comfortably familiar yet fresh and personal at the same time.
While Dance from a Distance isn’t quite a song without words, it does nonetheless contain precisely the same kind of melodic and harmonic writing as in Duncan’s usual output. It’s rooted around a main melody, heard after a brief intro, which i can never help imagining Duncan singing, as it has his familiar mix of smooth and angular contours, carried by his fluid, sometimes unpredictable harmonies. An accompanying rhythmic motif in the brass also appears early on, and becomes more important later, and there’s a brief excursion into a lower countermelody by way of contrast. But it’s the principal tune that we keep coming back to, each time reworked, going in different directions. At a critical point, Duncan pares back the texture to focus on this melody and just let it sing, becoming more poignant. Finally, the tune drops back to its original lower register with the accompaniment above it once again, ending with a final blast of the rhythmic motif.
It’s such a sweet little trifle, bringing to mind the wonderful orchestral underscore created by Jerry Martin and Marc Russo for the videogame The Sims, with precisely the same air of happiness and fun.
Thanks for this! I’m a big C Duncan fan but somehow missed this charming orchestral gem. He has a new album on the way, too, so that’s good news.