Nothing’s Wrong In Paradise

Beautiful heavyweight tip-on sleeve! Mystery 1985 Belgian studio project, rich in low-light dream tones, resurrected by the excellent Libreville Records
Recorded in Ghent in 1985 and Inspired by Weather Report, Vangelis and Eric Satie, Sunstroke’s sole LP was conceived as ‘a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist’. This idea of a score in search of a movie became an overused trope in the 90s. But it’s worth revisiting. The record makes perfect ‘picture music’ – a sophisticated meeting of post-Berlin-school dreaming, Yen-records hi-tech calm and impressionist cafe music ennui. What makes it most compelling though, is that even while it conjures a seemingly perfect world, something around the edges lets you know that all might not be as it seems
The weightless electric piano of the title track is hypnotic but numbing, sad and happy about it. The emulator tones that flit in and out of Re-Incarnation, a tribute to Satie, are the ghostly mirror of the kind of aspirational hi-gloss pop music that was everywhere when this music was made. Boat People, based on the sound of night time fog horns in the Port of Ghent, drifts ever farther out as the harbour lights slowly vanish from sight. Once you have spent some time with it, the whole record starts to seem bathed in a dim half-light, suggesting utopia glimpsed through a smudged lens