Listening Center’s latest LP for Polytechnic Youth is a set of warmly welcoming analogue synth compositions that carry the hopes and fears of tomorrow
Today’s programme for schools, intones the too-clipped voice, is the science of poetry. We will be examining the relationship between rational thought and creative impulse, asking whether one leads to the other, or if both occur simultaneously. It is our intention to [inaudible] the mechanisms of [sub-radio crackling distorts all further spoken text]
Lights flicker on-off on-off on before shutting down completely. The only sound left that of a tape unspooling. It feels like being inside a film where something wrong has been spliced between frames; as if witnessing a just-perceptible crack in reality. A generator reluctantly kicks in and the lights stutter back to life. Another tape reel starts up, manipulated by some phantom projectionist abandoning pictures for sonic landscapes. The banks of equipment emit a low-level hum as electronic sound fills the room. I sit back down in the slightly uncomfortable moulded plastic chair and listen.
Retrieving is the fourth Listening Center album to emerge on the thrillingly reliable Polytechnic Youth label. It’s nothing less than the sonic realisation of a blueprint for building better futures. David Mason’s retro-futurism is the most immediate and welcoming it has ever been – his equivalent to Ways of Seeing by The Advisory Circle perhaps. There’s a golden sheen of optimism about the album, which nevertheless still manages to hint at what could have been but wasn’t. These emotively studied electronic compositions are imbued with Tomorrow’s World hope and wonder. Although running through each piece – under Stepford Wives smiles – is the inherent threat of technology taking over. More Ray Bradbury than Skynet; a house that carries on its banal and myriad functions long after its occupants have passed out of memory, for there is no-one left to remember them.
The Space Age library music celebration of “Meridian” is constructed out of analogue synths that rise and rise. An urgent broken beat powers the machinery as interplanetary ambient washes create a limitless horizon-line. “Motif 684” is an action montage sequence, where the action is taking place in the lab and the narrative is scientific discovery. Lab-coated figures turn to camera, their faces erased of features. Something important is taking place, but they are barely present to mark it. Meanwhile, the submerged rave of “Circe Cipher” exhibits slow techno undercurrents which betray a surface lightness.
“Retrieving” represents memory folding in upon itself. Life experiment over, the brain centre prepares to shut down operations. Experiences appear briefly and are filed like unwanted holiday slides. There’s a woozy sense of the mind slipping away, synaptic paths decaying. The work of The Caretaker and Gavin Bryars’s “The Sinking of the Titanic” are evoked at a remove, before they too are sent to that hidden library of the mind. The Listening Center registers this sequence of events-erased and course corrects in emotional terms with “Quinqunx Quinquennium”. It throws the windows of the soul wide open, a breathing-deeply that suggests new life is possible after all. Surely the theme to an obscurely popular programme for schools concerned with science and poetry. Images of Brutalist buildings under construction accompany the mind’s eye as “Palinopsia” plays out an implied narrative. Architects and urban planners stroll about purposefully, periodically turning on heavily designed smiles. Mason employs a Kraftwerkian command of the language of machine music here and indeed throughout Retrieving.
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