Two divergent takes on loner explorations from The All Golden and Dean McPhee go under the review microscope

Partly due to the last year of pandemical impediments, this column has been rather swollen of late with talented lone crafters, predominantly with an electronics-only orientation. These two contrasting releases are however several steps removed from the work of such solo synth scene mainstays yet they still forge determinedly self-contained paths worth stepping on to.

With sister Lauren Laverne having somewhat unexpectedly steered a few Concrete Islands listening and review choices recently (most notably towards output from Geneva’s blossoming Bongo Joe label) via her BBC 6 Music radio show, Peter Gofton returns as The All Golden for a different variant of musical signposting with Pagodas – specifically back to his younger self.

Excavating from a mound of home-recorded cassettes filled-up with formative four-track dabblings put down in his teens and twenties, Gofton pushes these once fledgling sketches – originally assembled with “a Logan string synth found in a skip, a fretless bass, and his dad’s guitars and pedal” – through the hauntological filters of his older less rudimentary musical set-up and his more advanced skillset, for this second cassette/digital outing on Modern Aviation. The net results often seem like hallucinogenic flashbacks to half-remembered/half-embellished sound memories, warped and clouded by time and technology.

Along the way, things therefore curve circuitously but cohesively through eerie bird song-bolstered pastoralism (for “Orbit of the Eye”, which uncannily sounds like Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” had it appeared earlier and wordlessly amidst the eccentric studio sides of the sprawling Ummagumma instead of the super-polished Dark Side of the Moon); yearning spectral-Americana with hints of David Pajo’s hushed voice-led Papa M outings (“Come Inside”); primitive musique concrète juvenilia (“Cathy Berberian 1” and “Cathy Berberian 2”); haunted house noise collages (“Lucifer Telescope”); imagined visions of Vini Reilly doodling inside a tin-roof shed on a very wet day (on the rain shower-assisted “Talmage”); the filmic horror-folk manipulations of The Heartwood Institute (“Believe in Howard” and “The Black Atom”); and elegiac-to-foreboding dronescaping (“Fear Itself”).

Whilst this is genuinely the product of someone stitching together old sonic patches and threads that others would have simply added to the ‘out pile’ during some domestic decluttering, through the deployment of some inventive refashioning, Pagodas acts as a strangely entrancing exercise in creative uncommercial upcycling.

Taking a far more tightly-focused approach is Dean McPhee, with his fourth album Witch’s Ladder (Hood Faire/Cargo Records). After adding some subtle percussive elements to 2018’s Four Stones LP, the West Yorkshire-based solo electric guitar sculptor takes a starker sideways move with this follow-up collection of weighty instrumental pieces.

Openers “The Alchemist” and “The Alder Tree” pretty much stick to their creator’s established formulas, as mournful meditations that both look inwards as well as out across moonlit landscapes, blending shades of early-Mogwai, Robert Fripp’s most elemental work with Brian Eno and McPhee’s own inscrutable introspective mysticism.

Things reach into something more enthralling though with the sublime centrepiece of “Red Lebanese”, which blurs and smudges McPhee’s treated Telecaster lines into a spaced-out state of hypnosis. Through the less cosmically expanded “Eskdale Path” we’re taken into a twangier airier space, like a less low-end fixated Brokeback, gazing out on to rolling hills rather that desert-lined roads. Proceedings conclude with the sprawling but gripping 12 or so minutes of the title track, which discretely draws together elements from across the preceding parts of the record, gliding – albeit with trademark gravitas – through plaintive picking, ruminative rippling and smeary swirling.

It’s deep, intense and uncompromising stuff all told, unlikely to convince the previously uninitiated but sure to cement Dean McPhee’s status as someone who keeps tapping into something special while still remaining encrypted by unknowability.

Adrian
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