The person on the cover has become furniture, television, worker, and viewing audience at the same time. A paint-spattered body reclines heavily in an old brown chair, but where the head should be sits a small glowing screen. Another television rests beneath the feet like a footstool, discarded appliance, or technological altar. The figure may be watching through the television, being watched by it, dreaming inside it, or simply too exhausted to distinguish any longer between consciousness and programming. The surrounding collage of red fabric, wood grain, carpet, gloves, overalls, and obsolete electronics turns an ordinary room into a homemade command center whose commander appears to have fallen asleep during transmission.
Modern and unique sounds like language copied from a furniture advertisement, estate-agent listing, motel brochure, or handwritten sign beside an object at a yard sale. The phrase promises two qualities that should be easy to recognize but become slippery when placed together. Modern means belonging to now, although “modern” also names styles and technologies that became old decades ago. Unique promises that nothing else is quite the same, although advertising applies the word to thousands of nearly identical products. Add the number two and the title becomes beautifully self-contradictory. The unique thing has acquired a sequel.
Position Normal has always lived inside such verbal creases. Even the group’s name joins movement and stability. Position suggests where something has been placed, while normal promises that the placement follows an accepted standard. Yet very little in this music remains where language or culture normally leaves it. Voices become percussion. Household objects become instruments. mistakes become architecture. A title begins as a sentence and wanders away before locating its verb. Normality is not rejected from outside. It is entered through a loose floorboard.
The first Modern and Unique, released in 2023, was largely instrumental and presented as music made with instruments rather than the sampled voices and scavenged recordings historically associated with Position Normal. Its sequel greatly enlarges that idea. Chris Bailiff plays real and software piano, acoustic and electric guitars, double bass, congas, bongos, tambourine, synthesizers, and shakers disguised as produce. John Cushway returns with lyrics, stories, and the special vocal presence that has always allowed Position Normal to make speech sound half remembered before it has even finished being spoken.
Only two samples are admitted into the entire record. One is a dog barking twice. The other is a 1990s drum-and-bass fragment used in the hidden “Techno Non Stop.” For artists once celebrated as masters of the found fragment, this near-abstinence is more radical than continuing to add increasingly obscure source material. Position Normal has not abandoned collage. It has begun manufacturing the scraps itself.
That distinction is easy to miss because the new playing still sounds inherited, recovered, overheard, or transmitted through unsuitable equipment. The musicians can create a piano phrase in the present and make it feel as though it has survived inside a cupboard since 1978. A guitar need not be sampled from a forgotten instructional record to carry the posture of forgotten instruction. Original material can become found sound when it is recorded, cut, titled, and placed as though the makers discovered it among their own belongings.
Recording onto VHS is central to this peculiar time-fold. Videotape was designed to preserve moving images, with sound accompanying the picture. Using it primarily as an audio body leaves the image channel haunted by whatever is absent. The album becomes the soundtrack to a missing television program whose episodes may once have involved a man in an armchair, laughing trees, dirty dumplings, marine holidays, unexplained staring, and a dog permitted exactly two barks.
VHS also belongs to domestic memory in a way that pristine digital recording cannot imitate. It remembers shelves of unlabelled tapes, programs beginning late because someone failed to press record in time, advertisements interrupting films, family events accidentally taped over, tracking lines, remote controls with missing battery covers, and voices continuing after the picture has turned to snow. Position Normal does not merely use obsolete technology for warmth. It uses the social habits attached to that technology.
“Light Introduction” begins like illumination being introduced to a room rather than a band being introduced to an audience. The title could mean a gentle opening, but Position Normal titles rarely stay obedient to one meaning. Perhaps Light itself has arrived and must be presented. Perhaps the introduction weighs very little. Perhaps an introductory passage has been left near a window and faded. The music opens the curtains without establishing what kind of day has begun.
“Khee,” played on piano and guitars, has the quality of a word heard correctly but spelled privately. It may be a name, sound, exhalation, or key with its first letter slightly displaced. This is how language often enters Position Normal: not as clean semantic information but as a physical object handled long enough to acquire fingerprints. Cushway and Bailiff understand that a spoken syllable can remain compelling after meaning has loosened. The mouth becomes a small synthesizer made from muscle, air, memory, and social embarrassment.
“Dorian Chords” briefly announces musical theory with the solemnity of an educational film, only to disappear after little more than a minute. The Dorian mode traditionally occupies an emotional space between major brightness and minor sorrow, making it perfectly suited to Position Normal’s cheerful unease. Their melodies often appear pleased with themselves while something in the room remains unmistakably wrong. Happiness is not exposed as false. It has simply put on a cardigan belonging to someone who has been missing for years.
“Larfin Trees” performs one of the album’s tiny acts of word-morphing. Read aloud, the trees begin laughing, but the altered spelling makes the laughter belong to a regional accent, a child, a comic character, or somebody repeating a phrase they never saw written down. Trees can laugh through leaves and branches, but they can also appear to laugh at the human need to assign them expressions. The track lasts only forty-five seconds, enough time for the forest to make its remark before returning to ordinary vegetation.
“Think About The” ends before naming what should be considered. The title resembles a command clipped from a longer sentence, leaving the mind permanently leaning forward. Think about the what? The consequences, children, price, smell, future, old days, person beside you, dog outside? The missing noun turns thought into a room without furniture. Position Normal repeatedly discovers that incompleteness can be more generative than explanation. A complete sentence delivers information; a broken sentence recruits the listener.
“Book Looks” is the album’s emotional hearth. The song had circulated before this full release and was already singled out for the way its murmured domestic lyric evokes a man who loves the smell of his house and the people inside it. Home becomes animal, architectural, affectionate, and faintly claustrophobic. People share air, fabric, food, skin, habits, books, dust, and the smell produced by remaining near one another for years. The house does not merely contain the family. It gradually acquires them.
The title itself may suggest judging a book by its cover, a book returning the reader’s gaze, or the particular appearance a person acquires after too much time alone with printed matter. Position Normal’s homes are never simply cozy or sinister. They are burrows constructed from attachment. Safety and enclosure grow from the same walls.
“They Are Not Staring” addresses the social fear that other people have become a tribunal. The reassurance is specific, yet its specificity makes suspicion stronger. Nobody tells us not to worry about staring unless somebody has already felt watched. The sentence may be spoken by a friend, therapist, parent, conspirator, or one part of the mind attempting to calm another. Under a television-headed figure, the claim becomes even less secure. They may not be staring, but the screens certainly are.
The four “Theme Tune” pieces divide the album into imaginary programs. A theme tune traditionally promises recurrence. It tells the viewer that the same characters, room, and problems will return after the opening credits. Here no programs accompany the themes, so the listener must invent them from surrounding fragments. The album begins to resemble a television schedule from a country whose programs were all cancelled before transmission, leaving only their miniature musical identities.
This structure also suits the record’s unusual chronology. Bailiff describes its contents as spanning from the late 1980s to now. Instead of arranging those decades into a documentary progression, Position Normal lets old and new constituents coexist without identification badges. A youthful idea may be completed by older hands. A recent performance may pass through VHS and emerge sounding earlier than its source. Time is not a line but a house in which several versions of the residents occupy different rooms.
“Overwhelming” gives a large word less than two minutes in which to demonstrate itself. Modern life generally imagines the overwhelming as accumulation: too much information, noise, responsibility, memory, choice, grief, work, media, or future. Position Normal responds with compression. The miniature does not defeat excess by becoming empty. It traps excess inside a small container and allows pressure to become character.
“Dirty Dumplings (Done Dirt Cheap)” drags an AC/DC title into the kitchen, replacing dangerous deeds with inexpensive food that may have fallen onto the floor. It is ridiculous and exact. Much of domestic life consists of heroic musical energy being spent upon small edible objects. The dumpling deserves a riff too. Position Normal’s comedy does not simply mock grandiosity. It redistributes grandeur to objects and situations usually denied it.
“Someone Else’s Bare Minimum” contains an entire social philosophy. The least one person can manage may exceed another person’s greatest effort. Standards that appear objective often conceal differences in health, money, confidence, training, time, support, and luck. The phrase can sound accusatory, compassionate, resentful, or liberated depending upon which word receives emphasis. Someone else’s minimum should not become the ruler used to measure your maximum.
“Are Glued” is another grammatical fragment whose missing subject enlarges it. Eyes are glued. People are glued. Pieces are glued. We are glued to screens, chairs, habits, homes, histories, and one another. Glue repairs by preventing movement. It restores the object while permanently changing how the repaired area can flex. Much of the album behaves this way, fastening decades of material together without hiding the joins.
“And I Muddled All the Ins” turns muddling into a physical occupation. Perhaps the speaker confused every entrance, mixed up all the interiors, or disturbed the small words hidden inside larger ones. “Ins” are people with access, fashionable insiders, or the opposite of outs. To muddle them is to sabotage the border separating belonging from exclusion. Position Normal’s work has always invited outsiders into the living room while making insiders wonder whether they entered the correct address.
“Wham Marine Holidays” resembles the name of a budget travel company, a television special starring a pop duo on a boat, or a collision between sudden impact and organized leisure. Holidays promise temporary escape from the normal position. Marine holidays add water, unstable footing, unfamiliar creatures, and the possibility that the accommodation is slowly drifting away. The title alone constructs a brightly colored brochure whose small print may contain the actual song.
The secret bonus piece, “Techno Non Stop,” finally admits a recognizable 1990s dance sample. After an album built almost entirely from newly played material, the borrowed break arrives as a veteran performer wearing an old fluorescent jacket. “Party Party Drugs” is placed in parentheses like the hidden explanation adults feared beneath rave culture. Yet the track’s status as a secret bonus revives another vanished media pleasure: the unlisted song discovered because the CD continued playing or the cassette contained more tape than the printed sequence admitted.
Digital platforms usually make secrets difficult. Every track has metadata, duration, waveform, and searchable title. Position Normal preserves the vocabulary of concealment even when concealment has become theatrical. The secret is openly named, the bonus is part of the official program, and the non-stop music stops after three and a half minutes. Each claim cheerfully undoes itself.
That may be what modern and unique finally means here. Modernity is not a clean replacement of old tools by new ones. It is the strange simultaneous presence of software piano, VHS audio, 1990s sample CDs, late-1980s ideas, digital distribution, acoustic guitars, vegetable-shaped shakers, Bandcamp metadata, old televisions, and a duo whose original tape methods anticipated the layered flexibility now associated with computers. The future did not remove the attic. It installed wireless internet inside it.
The album’s short duration and tiny pieces prevent nostalgia from becoming monumental. Position Normal does not build a grand memorial to obsolete media. It continues using the debris. Their relationship with the past is practical, comic, and affectionate. Old technology is not worshipped because it was superior. It remains useful because every medium teaches the imagination a different way to arrange time.
On the cover, the television-headed body may therefore be neither victim nor warning. It may be the musician’s self-portrait as receiver, player, laborer, and archive. Paint covers the clothes because making things is untidy. The screen glows because reception continues. The chair supports a body carrying several decades of unfinished material, and the second television waits below like a spare head.
Modern & Unique 2 does not return a legend by pretending no years have passed. It permits all the years to enter at once. The songs arrive as themes for missing programs, domestic spells, verbal crumbs, half-remembered jokes, modal sketches, little rooms, and handmade transmissions. Nothing is polished into timelessness. Everything remains timed, taped, touched, and slightly out of position.
That is where Position Normal continues finding its unique normality: not in preserving the past unchanged, nor in proving its relevance through fashionable modernization, but in allowing old and new materials to live together without deciding which one is haunting the other. The television watches the person. The person wears the television. The archive becomes an instrument, and the newly played instrument immediately begins remembering something that may never have happened.
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