For the first time, David Mansfield thought outside collaboration could help Stranded become something new, a place he couldn’t get to on his own. He reached out to the Vacant Lots’ Jared Artaud, who agreed to produce Velvet Trace. Mansfield compares the process to Low obliterating their sound with BJ Burton or Primal Scream sending their Screamadelica material through Andrew Weatherall’s filter. The collaboration between Mansfield and Artaud led to Velvet Trace’s songs being mutated, blown apart, put back together. “I told him to do whatever he wanted,” Mansfield recalls. “He made things meaner and nastier.” While that might suggest an altogether more aggressive Stranded, it’s more a commentary on the corroded, bleary web of synths and processed guitars that consume the album. The project remains an outlet for Mansfield to look at the genres that made him, collapsing whole histories of (often English) alternative music together and turning them over in new light. He gave Artaud reference points like Clinic and nods to the Walkmen’s penchant for spinning a story, but what still comes through is Manfield’s core DNA — the autumnal drama of the Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen, here more romantic, haunting, and grandiose than on any preceding Stranded release. Within Stranded’s newly dense array of sounds, Mansfield is chasing fragments of memories, the immediacy of the music keeping things just grounded enough so he can run off into the ether. “I might take a moment, a slight memory, an image from that, and then build from it,” he says of his writing process. That’s how he defines the title Velvet Trace: “something softly holding in place, a memory, a fleeting emotion.” Between the swirling atmospherics of the music and Mansfield’s allusive words, he’s given us a space to get lost in, to find our own other worlds in.
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