Art of the Memory Palace – Dusk at Trellick Tower (Static Caravan)

Andrew Mitchell and Raz Ullah channel The New Brutalism and JG Ballard with an EP of lost-future pop music buried under béton brut

I pass through the city on public transport and catch glimpses of electronic signs at the side of roads. “Get Ballardian” suggests one, flickering amber lights against black board. “Go Brutalist!” states another, loudly in my head. Of course I doubt what I’m reading, consider the words deeply embedded subliminal messages that are self-transmitting. But there’s one more to take notice of and I interpret it as a set of instructions, a map to a time and place: “Dusk at Trellick Tower”.

Hungarian architect Ernő Goldfinger believed so completely in his post-war social housing project Balfron Tower that he moved into flat 130 with his wife Ursula Blackwell. JG Ballard extrapolated upon Goldfinger with the character Anthony Royal in High-Rise, who sits like a god atop the crumbling human experiment beneath him. The Dusk at Trellick Tower EP directly references another Brutalist masterwork by Goldfinger and draws upon Ballardian cartographies of concrete dreams.

Dundee’s Andrew Mitchell and Manchester’s Raz Ullah are municipal representatives of their population centres brought together as Art of the Memory Palace. Theirs is a lost-future pop music buried under béton brut and allowed to set, leaving fascinating imprints from the formwork. Synthscapes rise and fall like cities over centuries, populated with Mitchell’s near-distant vocals. Like some mad architect drunk on utopian hubris, 2019 has already seen Mitchell release one of the standout albums of recent times (The Paralian, under his Andrew Wasylyk persona). That he has teamed up with Ullah to sonically animate Brutalism may well be too much for the founder of a website named after a JG Ballard novel.

Art of the Memory Palace have built a very particular musical space for themselves with Dusk at Trellick Tower, which puts them out there alone, at the vanguard of a movement that doesn’t yet exist. Although The Pattern Forms album on Ghost Box would at least make for an interesting companion piece. TPF’s bucolic 1980s electronic pop feels like an escape from the city, but only as far as to a commuter town. Concrete is therefore still in the process of dominating the landscape rather than having become the landscape itself. Each group’s approach to pop music is steeped in modernist moments, taking from the forward-thinking past to construct hidden futures in the present.

“Wretched Mortal” is modernist pop in the vein of Broadcast that feels as if it is soaking up 1960s utopianism from the sky. Synthesisers surge through the metropolis’s arterial passages, slicing across the highest heights and lowest depths. The lost SF future of “Black Lighthouse” is a pulse transmission animating residents traversing endless apartment buildings in air-conditioned elevators. Meanwhile, electronic washes wipe clean the surfaces of “Man Spectre”, as an isolated protagonist contemplates his strained human interactions from cell-like living quarters. “Floor Thirty-One” is a punctuation point, an ambient ident advertising the two-part title tracks, a trip to Rekall Incorporated, or both. Memory is reignited on “Dusk at Trellick Tower Part 1” with its corporate library music submitted to psychedelic exploration and hints of Radiohead-in-the-underpass circa OK Computer. “Part 2” evokes the distorting concrete spaces before the utopian dream breaks and is best illustrated by a passage from Ballard’s High-Rise:

“Laing lay back on his balcony, watching the dusk fall across the façades of the adjacent blocks. Their size appeared to vary according to the play of light over their surfaces. Sometimes, when he returned home in the evening from the medical school, he was convinced that the high-rise had managed to extend itself during the day. Lifted on its concrete legs, the forty-storey block appeared to be even higher, as if a group of off-duty construction workers from the television studios had casually added another floor.”

This was a subliminal message.