Ultrasonic Grand Prix (Little Barrie & Shawn Lee) - INSTAFUZZ

The story of Ultrasonic Grand Prix is one of two vintage 60s guitars and their owners - multi-instrumentalist / producer Shawn Lee and guitar maestro Barrie Cadogan - of Nottingham freakbeaters Little Barrie.

“We’d been talking for years about making some kind of record. Cadogan explains, “but we were always being pulled in different directions with other commitments. Shawn got the ball rolling for real when lockdown happened, called me up and said, “You know we keep talking about doing a record, well the time is now”. I’m so glad he did.”

The music that did emerge was weird, startling, and insatiably groovy. With one foot dipped in the organ-warbling garage of 60s psych, and the other vibrating in the mind-expanding fractals of the British Acid House boom, INSTAFUZZ plies the earthly quintessence’s of blues, rock, soul and jazz, against the preternatural discomforts of programmed drums and unhinged synthesisers to produce something distinctly and nostalgically futuristic.

It’s a style that pays its debt to this project's launch-pad inspiration, 2012’s ‘Personal Space’ compilation. A collection of underground U.S 45s from the late 70s and early 80s fittingly dubbed ‘Electronic Soul’ - an appropriate descriptor, incidentally for these experiments from Ultrasonic Grand Prix.

With all the graininess of a documentary film compiled from bits and pieces of raw archive footage, INSTAFUZZ mashes various details and cuttings from its choice influences to invariably intriguing effects. The guitar twang-meets-intense synth of emphatic opener ‘Seamoon Rising’ is The Limiñanas at The Haçienda. At another extreme of the spectrum, ‘Green Means Go’ drifts into the neo-psychedelic waters of The Soundcarriers or Vanishing Twin - hauntological, uncanny, cruising into the wonders of egoless delirium, suspicion and atemporal intrigue.