Music: Group A.D. – Colour Space Transform: Looking Back to See Ahead

Group A.D. is a brand-new Leeds-based project whose name stands for The Group For Action & Dance. Their music exists in a vivid in-between space—melding dubbed-out rhythms, psychedelic no-wave abstraction, and spaghetti-western orchestral maximalism. Rather than imitating past styles, Group A.D. treats musical history as raw material, pulling fragments from different eras and reassembling them into something uncanny and forward-looking. Across their debut EP, influences flicker like signals—John Barry and Ennio Morricone’s cinematic sweep, Jet Harris’ surf-rock pulse, and spectral ’80s dancefloor drama—each appearing as a suggestion rather than a statement.

“Colour Space Transform” is a mission statement for the project’s philosophy. Opening with the line “There is no greater frontier than the one in the rear view mirror,” the track frames nostalgia as propulsion rather than retreat. Built initially around a sampled French soul record, the song found its emotional core only after the sample was removed—leaving behind strings that ache, swell, and recede with cinematic longing. Moving between the sonic languages of the 1960s and 1980s, the track embodies Daphne Oram’s idea of “looking back…to see ahead.” By the closing moments, the strings bloom like end credits to a strange, half-remembered television film, transforming absence into atmosphere and memory into momentum.

Band Page: https://www.instagram.com/group_a_d/