Sabbatical Wilderness, the newest addition to the Fox Food Records family, is a musical project from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Night Life in the Lemon Town of Büshka (or Büshkaのレモン町にナイトライフ as it was written on the Sabbatical Wilderness Bandcamp page) is the score to a short story of the same name.
Entirely instrumental, the album plies a lo-fi brand of layered, looped guitar music, existing at the weird, internet-only intersection of ambient, bedroom pop and vaporwave. The resulting soundscapes are odd and hypnotic, the kind of music perfect for early morning walks or late evening train journeys, everything cast different and important in the weak light.
This is perhaps unsurprising considering the first track is called ‘Dawn; on the train, waiting to see Francie’. Here the guitars are mellow and separated, the space between each chord as important as the chords themselves. You get the sense the album is stirring, not fully awake, as if the residents of the titular Lemon Town are just about rising for a new day. ‘Sunrise; would you like to grab some bagels? I know a great place!’ is sprightlier, the sonic embodiment of the town’s bustle as cafes and shops see a rush of early morning commuters. This brighter theme continues on ‘Afternoon; the sun shines through the bars of the bridge and I’m happy (in your hands)’, the sound languid in the way of a tropical vacation, like the small sway of a benign blue sea. ‘Dusk; falling asleep, know that you are loved’ winds down relaxed in the aftermath of a perfect day, while ‘Midnight; goodbye Francie, I’m going to miss you!’ sees the first real suggestion of melancholy, the realisation that the day is over descending like a black sheet. ‘???; night life in the lemon town of Büshka’ feels like a drunken walk home through dark streets, or perhaps a dark walk home through drunken streets.
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Now we get onto Side B of the tape and it is here where things get weird(er), as if entering a dream or else disconnecting from time in a more novel way. The wonderfully named ‘Büshka’s netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of every bruise on your body; the soft ringing that can be heard all throughout the town but can only be seen in shades of green’ sees a marked stylistic shift, teetering on the edge of that new wave alt-R&B sound without ever quite succumbing. Imagine if How To Dress Well was teleported back to the 90s and locked in a Squaresoft studio and forced to use whatever was at hand. The oddness continues with the restrained and almost eerie ‘Foreign smells, shop signs, and Büshkan sea creatures at the bazaar’, and ‘Spitting flames at the bus stop; the woman who spits flames at the bus stop’ which is more in-your-face and urgent. ‘Late afternoon; the trees in animal crossing are much smaller than the ones in real life; couldn’t we just stay here for a little while?’ sees a brief return to the Side A style while ‘Too Much Mackerel’ is subdued and almost forlorn, like the closing credits of a wistful story.
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For reasons I can’t quite pin down, the 90s Japanese RPG feeling hangs over the whole release, and I find myself imagining Lemon Town like a dot on a map from a strange Final Fantasy-Dragon Quest-Animal Crossing hybrid. The opening tracks conjure that town-going-about-its-business sensation you get when entering new locales in the regular portion of the game, while the songs not marked as a specific period in the title (i.e. ‘Büshka’s netherworld…’ onwards) have that distinct end-of-game freakiness common to the titles, where the main antagonist is revealed a puppet to an even more deranged supernatural controller before your party are thrust into some dreamworld to stop him/her/it. This probably isn’t quite what Sabbatical Wilderness intended, and I’m sure reading the story would provide a lot more context, but for now imagining an eccentric town within a peculiar video game will do just fine.
Night Life in the Lemon Town of Büshka is out today (11th August) and you can buy it from Fox Food Records.
