Beam Weapons - Music to Disperse Crowds (Miracle Pond)

Beam Weapons’ two track cassette on new label Miracle Pond is the sound of technology coming dangerously to life, a new flesh from the electronic swamp

Miracle Pond is a brand new cassette label that has arrived fully formed. It’s the brainchild of illustrator and graphic designer Nick Taylor, whose work for the likes of Castles In Space, Sharron Kraus and Delaware Road is some of the most distinctive and enveloping out there. It wouldn’t be a stretch to mention his name alongside Julian House and Frances Castle for bringing visual magic to beloved musical edgelands. I was sent the label’s first two complete releases (the initial entry is an ongoing conceptual tape project where the sides of a blank C60 cassette should be filled and taped over for as long as the artist releases tracks) and they immediately made their way to the top of my review pile.

Beam Weapons is Paul Bareham, who describes himself as a “conceptual person” rather than musician or technician. That the concepts presented here are so brilliantly – and horrifyingly – realised more than validates the distinction he’s made.

“Oubliette” is dangerously on the cusp of life, a new flesh out of the technological swamp. Its bubbling static draws out and contorts, forcing you to peer in upon yourself and over your shoulder. A flapping of nightmare wings; a power station unbalanced. It’s as if the transgressive, reality-altering-signal in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome is actually an interactive version of Stalker rather than the titular show, its nuclear portent translated into body horror atrocities. Or else “Oubliette” is the soundtrack to an as-yet-unmade adaptation of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.

Side two is itself a thing of two halves: “Super Heavy Actualisation / Invasion of the Bee Girls”. A man and a woman exchange blank, slowly spoken statements that “everything is going to be all right” from what sounds like Eraserhead space. The Lynchian comparisons do not end there, for the cumulative message is as discomforting as the giant in Twin Peaks enunciating carefully that “it is happening again”. After that, the track ascends into a sustained synth-throb, like TG’s Chris Carter making lived-in 1980s SF title music for Paul Verhoeven. Beam Weapons may pack a lot of ideas into fifteen minutes, but each of them serves the conceptual framework and Music to Disperse Crowds is therefore brimming with artificial life.

miraclepond.bandcamp.com