Like a kid full of sugar, ex-Soup Dragon Sushil K Dade has a surfeit of enthusiasm that has attracted a stellar cast to his fourth album. Members of Sonic Youth, Belle & Sebastian, Can, the Go-Betweens and the Stooges perform, as Dade fuses Scottish and Asian culture with a catholic mix of pop, folk, spoken word, baroque chamber music and free jazz (hello, Thurston Moore).
The results are brimful of charm and wide-eyed experimentation. Eyes of Love, sung by Stuart Murdoch and Sarah Martin, fizzes with a 2 Tone spirit that seems at odds with Sonic Youth's space-rock take on Sun Ra's Nuclear War. Dade reels in novelist Alasdair Gray for a brief psychometric test, and Mike Watt of the Stooges and Can's Damo Suzuki literally phone in their performances: Suzuki took part in a live phone jam from Cologne. His fuzzy, dislocated voice conjures a haunting spirit for closing highlight Festival of Lights.