Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea

There is no denying that Glasgow has more than its fair share of prolific producers and sublime songwriters over the years. 2000 saw a slew of great releases from the recent breed of Scottish tunesmiths such as The Delgadoes and Belle And Sebastian, plus stunning returns to form from those great musical institutions affectionately known as The Fannies and The Scream.

Enter Sushil K. Dade. A Glaswegian driving instructor of Indian ethnic origin who comes strongly recommended purely on the merits of releasing split singles with both The Pastels and Two Lone Swordsmen. Dade collaborated with the great and good of the city's musicians over a three day recording stint on the banks of the Clyde, and the end result of these lightning-speed sessions is a feast of spontaneous surprises on his first proper album under the Future Pilot AKA alias. The listener is showered with a dazzling sun-kissed collection of Indian Spirituals, song cycles, chants, blissful guitar pop and haunting instrumentals,

containing such curios as Stuart Murdoch and Isobel Campbell singing in Indian!

In recent years, multi-ethnic collaborative collages have produced some of the cleverest and most inventive albums in contemporary pop, the incendiary Rafi's Revenge by Asian Dub Foundation and Cornershop's beatbox beauties on When I Was Born For The Seventh Time being two excellent cases in point. Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea sounds absolutely nothing like either of these beaty beasties, but orbits a weird and wonderful pop universe entirely of Sushil's creation. One would be well advised to stay very closely tuned.