New wares from Polypores, The Home Current & Peter Wix, Transient Visitor and Apta usher in another busy year for home-workaholics

The dividing line between musical annum is decidedly distorted across this current mid-winter; particularly with ongoing Covid-19 skewed record label logistics continuing to collide into the workflow of home-working artists whose productivity keeps increasing exponentially. Amongst other things, this leads to new releases arriving out of chronological creation order. Nevertheless, for all the sequential blurring, it’s the material itself that matters most, regardless of when it was birthed and when it is reaching our ears, as this freshly-packed tranche of sonic goods from reliable points of origin attests.

Having delivered more recordings in 2020 than some manage in ten years, Stephen Buckley reopens his Polypores pipelines with Chaos Blooms, a long-promised return to Polytechnic Youth. Recorded last September, this twelve-track set feels deliberately distanced from other still-fresh Polypores produce. Less fixated on meditative moodscaping and more in thrall to shorter sharper sculpting, here Buckley forges a brutalist bespoke blend of free-jazz-inspired looseness and gritty glitchy electro minimalism that joins the dots between Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way, Fripp & Eno’s No Pussyfooting and Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

Hence, proceedings divide into passages of fizzling polyrhythmic percolations (“Destroyer”, “Dots” and “Fluctuations”), scrambled art-noise primitivism (“Moontangle”, “Machine Jazz” and “Dense Periodic Orbits”) and brittle beatific blissfulness (“Angel Away”, “Equilibrium” and “The Computer”). While those attuned to the more serene side of Stephen Buckley’s sonic spectrum may not find Chaos Blooms as immediately approachable or as immersive as some of last year’s rich Polypores product range, those already voluntarily strapped-in for his full unexpurgated journeying should find that it acts as an arresting detour.

Although fellow one-man industry Martin Jensen already has three standalone long players as The Home Current on three different labels lined up for the coming months – in the form of Not Our Kind of Vertigo (Polytechnic Youth), The Coyote Kiss (Lonely Mountain Records) and Endless Exile (Woodford Halse) that were respectively recorded in 2018, 2019 and 2020 – in the interim arrive two near back-to-back collaborative affairs for Subexotic cut during last year.

The first is Unfortunes, a conjoined collection from The Home Current & Peter Wix. Featuring Jensen shaping his sound moulds around the spoken words of the erstwhile Jean Paul Special and Continental Film Night veteran, the album is full of kaleidoscopic calculations on each side of the equation. For the former this manifests as multi-patterned beds of Remain in Light-like globalist-funk, Low-life-era New Order pulsations, squelchy euro-techno and skittering Four Tetisms. For the latter it unfurls as oblique dark novellas, told through a variety of adopted voices that shift between being reminiscent of Aidan Moffat and Ian Dury as well as Christoph Waltz and HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Curiously however, the standout moment comes when Wix’s daughter Charlotte takes the vocal spot on “55”; an imagined lost mid-80s studio meet-up between Laurie Anderson, The Cocteau Twins and Kraftwerk. It’s a heady inventively flavoursome stew all told, that’s best taken in piecemeal portions, to properly digest the complex ingredients intertwined within.

Taking a somewhat quicker and less multifaceted approach is TV1, the first results of Jensen’s file-swapping hook-up with Alex Cargill of The Central Office of Information under the shared Transient Visitor moniker. Unlike Unfortunes, it’s tricky to tell who did what across the eight gathered pieces, with the twosome interlocking their own idioms into a shared aural lexicon. It does though lean strongly into Jensen’s most groove-driving impulses and Cargill’s gifts for textured layering. Thus, along the way the duo dive into full-fat Balearic beatscapes (“Survival of the Phattest”), Primal Scream’s deepest dubby experiments (“Go for What Spins”), industrial strength acid house (“Broken Mercy” and “Trip Switch”), heavily warped 80s sci-fi film scoring (“Watch the Skies”) and Sextet-meets-Computer World mashing-up (“Sidcup Boogie”). Despite undoubtedly being a record that would sound more alive in a discerning underground club, during more socially undistanced times, TV1 marks the start of a promising new partnership.

Having inaugurated Apta as far back as 2012, the affable Barry Smethurst has steadily ramped-up his release rate and profile under the solo alias over the last twelve or so months; with two low-key mini-albums, an extremely limited single and a couple of creditable compilation appearances. 2021 looks set to grant the project a justifiably wider audience; with an expanded Polytechnic Youth-enabled vinyl reissue of 2020’s Rainbow Islands cassette in the offing and this first proper album-length Apta suite – modestly entitled Vignettes – on the burgeoning Woodford Halse. Forged meticulously in his domestic studio set-up across the middle of 2020, this balmily-rendered collection is one of the most satisfyingly soothing ways to soundtrack our tentative entry into a still uncertain but more optimistic new year.

With treated guitar lines encircled by bass, electronics, assorted percussion and harmonium, the multi-skilled Smethurst showcases a knack for bending and blending tiers of instrumentation into dreamily merged assemblages that defy easy pigeon-holing. Yet it is possible to pick out languid nods to Vini Reilly and Sonic Boom (“Equinox”), watery echoes of Cluster & Brian Eno (“The First Sight”), gentle salutes to the pastoral-electro of Pulselovers (“12v” and “Segue”) and strands of Polypores’ most contemplative earthbound moments (“We Watch the Horizon Fade”). In short, Vignettes could be the first micro-weight masterstroke of the year.

Adrian
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