Review: Former Pulled Apart By Horses guitarist James Adrian Brown has been crafting his new sound since early 2021 when he transitioned from fuzzed guitars to lush synthesisers. His debut EP, Terra Incognita, is a six-track electronic journey reflecting his mental health struggles and self-discovery. It was originally intended as an album and the EP evolved into a more focused project showcasing Brown's use of tape recording hardware, analogue synths, and unique instruments sourced from the Yorkshire Dales such as stone xylophones and homemade antennas. Terra Incognita explores themes of introspection and healing and captures the essence of Brown's immersive recording process.
Review: Andrea Cichecki - a German DJ, music producer and audio engineer based in Dresden - presents her debut LP for Castles In Space, building on an intense reflection on her past. Having been brought up on the precipice of countryside and woodland, Cichecki is a lifelong adherent to what she called the "edge effect", thriving on the boundaries of things both metaphorical and actual, rather than sticking within them. Bringing macro-cosmic scale to Moogish synthesis, each track weaves a personal story of an implicit, instrumental nature, unalloyed by words, and incorporates field recordings from the Ore Mountains and the wild, valleyed landscape of Saxon, Switzerland.
Review: Oxide Manifesto serves as an audio sketchbook, exploring a unique approach to music creation by blending obsolete machines with experimental composition. The album embraces the imperfections of magnetic tape, such as wow, flutter, wonky pitch, and tape hiss and so, explains the artist, makes the recording equipment as central to the process as the music itself. The method involved quickly composing ideas, deconstructing them onto tape loops, and performing with reel-to-reel machines and effects. The whole thing was recorded in a tiny, temperature-fluctuating studio on Hornsey Road and the final album reflects a collection of sound-art experiments that are structured and fragmented and capture the raw creativity of what was a hugely hands-on process.
Review: On a remote, gravel-covered spit along the east coast stand the remains of a Cold War-era government weapons testing and radar facility. In the mid-1960s, this site hosted the creation of an over-the-horizon radar-a groundbreaking system designed to bounce signals off the ionosphere to monitor distant nations. Its success depended on a complex interplay of frequency, solar cycles and atmospheric conditions but yet persistent interference plagued the system and rendered it ineffective. Despite multiple investigations, it was decommissioned and dismantled by the early 1970s. Today, the once-ambitious Cobra installation lies dormant, reclaimed by nature as a quiet, unlikely wildlife refuge and these are sounds inspired by it.
Review: The work of London-based Suffolk lad Dalham (Jon Michaelides) often comes accompanied by textual musings on existential themes, and his latest record And The Sun is no exception, hearing him quip on the mooted tulip that is generative AI: "As humankind strives to create artificial intelligence what will faith, love, or morality look like to a nascent consciousness? Will it be capable of understanding its creators who often hold logic and superstition within themselves?" So do questions of climate, macro-scale recklessness, and internal contradiction abound on this new record; an eight-track sublime that fits in well with the label's retromodernist, sometimes neo-pagan aesthetic sensibility. A weird Western ambient odyssey, where one abstract electronic artist's resident Suffolk surroundings merge with the same piano-led, drum machine-mapped scenes, not also long ago explored in 2024's 'Alive In Wonderland'.
Review: Building on a career's worth of 90s freeform punk, 00s underground techno and every minimalistic and healing sonic contour in between since then, Jo Johnson returns to the fore with her latest record Red, White & Yellow. "Waves" and "tidal forces" are the first verbal associations that spring to mind, as we're dunked into many a sequent swell and ruminant ripple of sound. In the hat-trick of tracks that is 'It Just Is The Love It Feels', 'Inside Eyes Sparks Fire Under Ice' and 'Unfolding & Folding', we hear a holy trinity of sorts, eschewing isolable tempi or affects for a deeply warming kind of minimalism.
Review: Kevin Pearce's Science Fiction Ballads For The Lost Generation emerges as a riveting exploration of sonic storytelling and atmospheric nostalgia. Inspired by Vangelis' evocative 'Blade Runner' soundtrack, Pearce conceived the album as a cinematic journey, crafting a collection of songs that embody a sense of mystery and introspection. Initially recorded as a personal experiment, the album remained hidden for years until Pearce rediscovered it by chance. With its unearthed quality, Science Fiction Ballads exudes a timeless allure, reminiscent of audio fossils waiting to be discovered. Fans of soundtracks everywhere should really be interested in this release.
The Sound Of Science (Soundtrack)(gatefold coloured vinyl LP + booklet + MP3 download code (comes in different coloured vinyl, we cannot gurantee which colour you will receive))
Review: Dean Honer and Kevin Pearce - a pair of musicians and critics enmeshed in the British music landscape since day dot - grew so sick of the manufactured children's songs they'd heard on vinyl and CD over the years that they decided to create their own version, albeit with a twist. 'The Sound Of Science' is a tongue-in-cheek rendition of this unique utility music format, designed to bypass its tendency to quickly "become a form of torture" for the adults in each other's families. Instead, this album is fun for both the kids and the parents, with science and astronomy forming the bulk of its themes.
Review: Gordon Chapman-Fox's latest album, Your Community Hub, delves into the New Towns movement, particularly focusing on Warrington-Runcorn's community centers and their relevance to modern urban planning discussions like the 15 Minute City concept. The album explores the decline of these centers and the services they once offered, paralleling a broader societal shift away from communal support. Through evocative album artwork featuring architect Peter Garvin's work, notably the Castlefield Community Centre, Chapman-Fox paints a vivid sonic picture of a bygone era of community cohesion. Following the success of 2023's The Nation's Most Central Location, this album is poised to continue Chapman-Fox's critical acclaim and commercial success, offering a poignant reflection on the past and present state of communal life.
Shared Sense Of Purpose (Vince Clarke remix) (5:00)
Oakwood (3:21)
Shared Sense Of Purpose (1973 version) (4:22)
Review: 'A Shared Sense Of Purpose' is a fittingly collectively-minded name for a new Gordon Chapman-Fox aka. Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan release. The first glimpse of his latest full-length LP, Your Community Hub, this first sampler hears the artist continue to develop his totally singular vision in eerie modernist electronica, deploying lilty arpeggiations and contradictorily Utopian, yet at the same time, sinister, melodies and ambiences; all with a view to producing an uncanny deja entendu. These are deployed to mourn the slow, increasing privatisation of Chapman-Fox's native Warrington-Runcorn, specifically its singular bespoke town centre - its walkways, its local postal system, its gridded shop lots - which were all designed to make it a five-minute city, long before the concept of fifteen-minute cities had entered town planning discourse. Though, perhaps this lament masks a more sinister sense of enjoyment, as there is indeed a perverse sort of pleasure that arises in the bittersweetly uncanny perfumes that waft from this latest haunted mood piece. Perhaps just like the experience of revisiting Warrington-Runcorn after having known it in childhood, we hear both sadness and euphoria, at the same time, in the face of its ostensible loss.
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