Keith Seatman – Time to Dream but Never Seen (Castles in Space)

Keith Seatman’s phantasmagorical progtronica does like to be beside the seaside on his Time to Dream but Never Seen long player

Like peeking round a corner and viewing scenes from your own or someone else’s past. Old photographs brought to life with the horrible high-definition of reality. The dream architecture is falling apart or – less dramatically – merely fading along the edges. Keith Seatman holds it all together as if pulling rabbits from hauntological hats. He is a Dave McKean-inked Morpheus on the threshold of his own perception.

These excursions across Time to Dream but Never Seen – twelve of them, collected and released on Castles in Space – distribute echoes of disparate worlds in LP format. The sounds are given aesthetic accompaniment in the delightfully knowledgeable liner notes from Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp, whose Belbury Poly is a sideways influence upon Seatman’s work of crumbling seaside experimentation.

Each track is a mechanical box, the album a set of Russian dolls peculiarly connected but of the same family. It makes for a sometimes uncomfortably intriguing experience. That unease you feel? It is just around the corner.

The experience may be mapped out as follows:

An ice cream is plucked from the hand of a bank-holidaying visitor by the most cunning of seagulls, who proceeds to drop it upon the bald pate of a red-faced man. (“On to the Pier & Down to the Sea”)

Drones manifest like an ocular migraine aura. Malfunctioning equipment breaks through the projected illusion of a flatlining patient. (“Adventure Island”)

The sweep of public information films fed through a nightmare funnel. Used by commonplace demons to infect night-time thinking. (“Avoid Large Places”)

Attending the mesmerist’s ball. A seaside retreat along watery ley lines, taking in Ann Quin’s Berg and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (as transplanted to England). (“Tippy Toe Tippy Toe”)

Jaunty progtronica that is a cousin of Belbury Poly circa New Ways Out and cut from similarly evocative cloth. (“Last One in”)

An alchemist’s opium habit. His story told by shadow puppets of Coleridge and De Quincey stuttering across bare walls. (“Compact Bedroom Circus”)

End of side one.

Parade of the animatronic animals – culled from Blade Runner and made over within a children’s educational programme hosted by Leonard Rossiter. (“Looks Greener”)

Constant creation of crop circles through Sisyphusian labour. (“High and Low and To and Fro”)

A man of words. Frequent collaborator Douglas E Powell enters the fray as a latter day Alfred Watkins, lightly evoking The Seasons. (“Speak Your Piece”)

Industrial tools for ploughing fields replaced by vintage synths. A lost future crashes into the freshly tilled earth, encased within a lonely meteorite. (“The Hang Bird”)

Robots of death dance the dance of death. Doctor Who does The Seventh Seal. (“Waiting by the Window”)

Melodies provide memories. Of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, the bucolic film with a film from Berberian Sound Studio and James Bond in the track’s final throes. (“Time to Dream but Never Seen”)

It is time to wake up.

keithseatman-cis.bandcamp.com