It's Cosy Inside is one of those happily obscure records: not essential, but not replaceable either, singular and weird, but so comically gentle that it's easy to see how it was ignored and just as easy to see how it was forgotten. It was released in 1989 on Independent Project Records by two English brothers, Mark and Clive Ives. Their website says they make "Indie Electronic New Age for meditation, relaxation, yoga & shiatsu." Below the text, you can see them, the Ives brothers. One is wearing a dashiki; both are wearing what appear to be sailor hats. They are smiling big toothy smiles. "Hi!" the photo says. "We're friendly!"
Woo have at least 10 albums; It's Cosy Inside is only one of four that I've heard, and the best, too; A La Luna is a close second. Though they were never attached to any particular scene, It's Cosy Inside can easily be connected to a whole subterranean history of quiet, gooey music: certain songs by the English folk/new-age band Penguin Café Orchestra, the audio collage project the Focus Group, the Krautrock/kosmische band Cluster, instrumental interludes by the opera composer Robert Ashley, the homebody sides of Animal Collective, Sun Araw, and several other more contemporary bands. Call it board-game psychedelia, maybe; armchair ambient.
"Ambient" is a word usually used to describe albums that create wide-open spaces: the sky, the desert, the highway at night, etc. Even Brian Eno's imagined airport-- from 1978's Music for Airports-- is a place of wide tunnels, high ceilings, and windows all around. The difference between Woo and most ambient music is scale: It's Cosy Inside is a domestic album whose map is drawn in its song titles: "Wallpaper", "No More Telly", "End of the Attic", "It's Cosy Inside". It gets as far as "Downtown Suburbia", then turns around (and note that this is downtown suburbia). But the album's limited imagined space is also what makes it so wonderful and disorienting: Like the second side of Animal Collective's Sung Tongs, It's Cosy Inside stakes itself on the premise that the most cosmic and revelatory experiences you'll ever have will all happen between your house and the backyard.
Most of it is made with acoustic guitars, gently strummed and run through effects pedals that make them sound slinky and liquid. Sometimes, clarinets come in. Melodies are pretty, sweet, almost sing-songy, but never assertive-- they ebb in, they ebb out. Knowing how little to play in situations like this is probably more important than knowing how much to play, and while there's never any silence on It's Cosy Inside, the album has a barely-there quality-- music as cobwebs, music as mist.
Music this strange certainly has the right to present itself as serious, mystical shit doing all kinds of serious, mystical investigation. It's to Woo's credit that they don't. Every level of It's Cosy Inside*--* from the cartoonish front cover to the song titles to the sound itself-- is chipper and inviting. They're just two smiling brothers in sailor hats making quiet guitar ooze for you to get massaged to. I first heard about them from the reliably interesting Mutant Sounds blog about five years ago. "Hello," one of the post's comments read. "This is my first ever blog-- how exciting to be talking to the computer-- we went to visit a crop circle last week just outside Barbury Castle in Wiltshire, and that was pretty exciting-- but this is-- Wow!!!!" Crop circles, yeah-- "pretty exciting." The post, of course, was signed by Mark Ives-- half of Woo.
