Edward Ka-Spel, Motion Kapture

CD version. Anagramma is the second album by Edward Ka-Spel, singer and co-founder of The Legendary Pink Dots, with the Italian electronic duo Motion Kapture. It came out on the Italian label Rustblade in April 2022, three years after their first joint album Alien Subspace. Ka-Spel's voice is set inside long synthesizer pieces that look back to cosmic music, krautrock and ambient. The duo's palette leans on vintage synthesizers and Mellotron, with Ka-Spel adding his own effects and noise on top.

Motion Kapture are Stefano Rossello and Filippo Corradin. Rossello plays Mellotron, guitars and Solina, along with a rack of synthesizers that includes a Juno 106, a DX7 and a Pro One, plus an RD-8 drum machine. Corradin plays bass, a Prophet 08, a Waldorf Q, a Virus Polar and the Continuum Fingerboard, and both are credited with effects. The music was recorded at Furnace Studio in Legnago, near Verona, and at O.M. Studio in Agna, near Padua, while Ka-Spel recorded his voice parts in London. Justin Bennett mixed and mastered the album at Studio 23 in Bologna. Rossello also designed the artwork and Corradin made the accompanying videos.

The album runs to nine tracks and just under fifty minutes. It opens with the short Byus, a little over three minutes, before stretching out in The Devil's Night, past six minutes. The longest piece is Toward Omega, at eight minutes, placed near the end before the closing Coming Up for Air. Ka-Spel is credited with voice, effects and noise, so his part goes beyond the words. The instrument list points to the sound: Mellotron and string-machine pads, analogue and digital polysynths, guitars, bass and a drum machine.

Rustblade introduced the album as "a conceptual voyage through space kraut rock and meditative ambient atmospheres in extended visionary ballads". Ka-Spel framed it in his own note as an attempt to reflect in sound the colours of a distant planet "where friendly talking dolphins live and the concept of anger isn't part of the language". On the Pink Dots' Bandcamp he called it a second spacey adventure with the Italian cosmic pioneers, and hinted that more could follow. For Motion Kapture it sits alongside their own Rustblade releases, Out of Focus (2019) and Ermit (2020).

This is the single CD edition on Rustblade (RBL083), released in 2022 in a six-panel digipack limited to 499 copies.