A bitesize round-up of releases – featuring Three Three Fives, Hawksmoor and Deliquescent Crystals – offers up some distinctive flavours

Although this column has fallen into a monthly pattern of late in an attempt to bulk batch review from the steady stream of new releases that arrive on a weekly basis, not everything can be covered in one sitting. Hence, some things just to have to be left behind or occasionally held over to another month. But with July’s release coverage already accounted for and the below trio of distinctive new albums arriving late in June, an interim inspection session felt like a necessity.

Although Dom Martin is indeed rolling down the shutters on his primary Polytechnic Youth outlet for a combination of reasons (see Concrete Islands passim and the label’s Facebook page), rebooted smaller sibling imprint Feral Child is still happily to continue. Whilst the focus of the venture is to be deliberately more diverse and esoteric for the foreseeable future, with a significant focus on conceptual lathe-cut 7” bundles, it doesn’t diminish things to say that the LP-sized Kind of Surreal from Sheffield’s Three Three Fives feels like it could have found a home on any of Martin’s enterprises over the years (namely Earworm, The Great Pop Supplement and Deep Distance, in addition to Polytechnic Youth).

This second full-length release from Sheffield’s semi-anonymous male and female duo of Jon and Emily – which has been floating around digitally on Bandcamp since early-2021 – is positively marinated in the art-pop, motorik-minimalism and psych-rock seasonings that have tickled Martin’s tastebuds over the years.

Built around layers of vintage analogue synths, organ, guitars, drum machines and the hazy vocal tones of Emily, the album slides through the fuzziest passages of Yo La Tengo’s Painful and Electr-O-Pura (“Come with Me Slowly” and “Goddess”), lashings of early-Spiritualized (“I’ll Never Survive”), remouldings of Mazzy Star’s most opiated moments (“Dry Eyed Blues”), imaginary hook-ups between Sonic Boom and The Jesus & Mary Chain (“Demons” and “Escape Scene”) and Slowdive’s most strung-out Rachel Goswell-voiced moments (“I Know When It’s Over”).

Fans of such cohesively combined reference points will be in 33 1/3 heaven. Hopefully, Feral Child can also find the funds to give a physical outing to the twosome’s still-download-only debut, 2016’s A Future Without.

Taking a more thematic rather than sonic magpie-like approach are two CD releases with a timely summer solstice angle.

The first comes from the more-than-familiar-to-these-pages Hawksmoor (AKA James McKeown) in the shape of Head Coach (Spun Out of Control). Following on from the self-described ‘pagantronica’ journeyings of his Saturnalia LP on the mighty Library of Occult earlier this year, McKeown now delivers a selection that seeks to explore the ‘urban planning as druidic vision’ story behind the creation of the somewhat misunderstood Buckinghamshire new town of Milton Keynes, where according to the press release, its grid-like layout was consciously aligned to the sunrise on the summer solstice.

Whether knowing this conceptual framing adds to the music or not is hard to say, but the mixture of unearthly electronics, live basslines and guitar textures certainly seems to find a forbiddingly mesmeric connection between urban landscape design and ancient civilisation mysteries.

Thus, through twinkling druid-friendly enigmas (“Solstice Alignment”), Joy Division-meets-Warrington-Runcorn New Town Plan municipal pulsing (“On Netherfield Estate”), moonlit eeriness (“The Light Pyramid”), buzzing ambience (“Pagan Sun Temple”), the most languid corners of the Pink Floyd canon (“Silbury Boulevard”), Steve Reich-goes-New Age rhythmscaping (“Gridsquares and Redways”) and the proggier end of 70s kosmische (“The Medicine Wheel”), Head Coach is another comfortably niche but magnetically engrossing Hawksmoor construction.

Also expressing a penchant for prehistoric tangents is Benjamin Ian Powell, now trading as Deliquescent Crystals (after 25 years operating under the Llyn Y Cwn and Mank aliases). Taking oceanographic measurements on scientific research vessels for his day-job but working on the side to reinvigorate the perhaps too often side-lined portable laptop-and-headphones avenues of electronic music-making, Powell delivers Time Turns into Space (Castles in Space), as a truly deep-digging ambient affair.

With conceptual cues from the Neolithic passage tombs of Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales taken into its sculpted sonic headspace, this is not made for easy listening. Consequently, things take a while to settle on to an audio plane. Whilst the opening flickers and throbs of “Portal” are fairly easy to absorb, the ensuing expansive glitches and murmurs of “Secret Knowledge” and subterranean drones of “The Protectress in The Shadow” are slower to swallow.

However, it’s the two epic 17+ minute pieces rounding-out the collection, that arguably give Time Turns into Space its commanding character. Thus, “The Pattern Stone” steadily hypnotises with airy meditative burbling before bleeding into the title track, which subtly swells and swirls through subaquatic beats and a coda of murmurs, as if time-travel to the original era of stone circles could in fact be enabled through patches in ProTools (or equivalent software).

It’s heady stuff for sure then, but for those who might have once lost and rediscovered themselves during a particularly out-there festival set from The Orb or aurally ingested Aphex Twin’s Selection Ambient Works Volume II whilst looking up at the stars on clear dark night in the Welsh countryside, Time Turns into Space should make a lot of sense.

Adrian
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