Heat Death, Dalham’s third LP and first for Castles In Space, is a thrillingly original electronic work that draws comparisons with early Boards of Canada

Heat Death is Music Has the Right to Children by way of Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”. “That sun,” troubles the father in Bradbury’s short story. “He could feel it on his neck, still, like a hot paw.” He’s contemplating the virtual reality room that his children have jammed on an African veldt setting – complete with hungry lions – and considering his end without knowing it. Where Boards of Canada captured rainy childhood days spent indoors watching sinister 1970s programming, Dalham paints a vivid picture of technology made primal and gone wrong. It’s a dystopia conceived by overheated imaginations and allowed to gain life through the realisation of destructive impulses. You can feel the heat whilst soaking up these electronic transmissions like gamma rays.

At ten tracks and clocking in at just under thirty minutes, Heat Death feels like a post-techno manifestation of JG Ballard’s compressed novels (out of which The Atrocity Exhibition was constructed), with its blasts of abstract yet visceral beams, pulses and crackles. Indeed, “Infinite Key” evokes fields of monolithic pylons, active sentries manipulating malevolent signals from outer space. Under a minute and a half of suspended time. “Genesis” then feels like nothing less than the beginning of end times, a decaying synth line stalking a post-nuclear landscape, recalling early Pye Corner Audio or horror synth workouts.

Dalham gets close to the sun on “Perihelion” with its low end growl, deconstructed sensory deprivation tank trance and out in the country electronica. Then to “Sigil”, which has the terrible beauty of a dying star. It sounds like the past, present and future barely contained in three minutes – clean, simple, unknowable and vast. Sliced-up intricate breaks take the pulse of the moment, a quiet doomsday device counting down as the 1970s abstract nature documentary waves threaten to spill over and heighten the everyday. I can’t pinpoint where and when I first heard Boards of Canada during 1998, but I suspect the encounter felt similar to hearing “Sigil” for the first time.

The time-loop corrective of “Beacon” re-sets imaginative borders as it delves and soars, allowing “IRIS” to grow from the corner of the room and become what is breathed there. Meanwhile “NGC 493” is delicate early Warp magic atop a writhing mass of wires and plugs; all bleeps, breaks and burnt out landscapes.

There’s a real sense of sustained purpose throughout Heat Death. It is not however a closed narrative – quite the opposite. Pared down yet vast in scope and feeling, Dalham’s third LP demands and rewards dedicated repeat listens; it is all too easy to spend days under its spell, and trust me, you will. For this is machine music that gets at you like a hot paw in the wrong room and always feels so right.

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Stewart Gardiner
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