Another electronic scene side round-up, featuring Kieran Mahon, The Heartwood Institute, The Home Current, Personal Bandana and Pulselovers

Synth-cooked dishes aren’t all we eat as part of the omnivorous Concrete Islander diet – as we are aiming to highlight further in our widened review menu selections during 2021 – but there’s no doubting that they form a substantial part of it. Moreover, with recordings that require multiple musicians to be in the same room together likely still to be in shorter supply for the time being, it’s probable that solo-run or at least small ensemble-curated electronic kitchens will continue to serve things up at an impressively engorging rate. Like the below…

With the Castles in Space label setting sail on its most ambitious year-long voyage to date – given an extra tailwind by a run of special vinyl and digital side-offerings from an already satisfying subscription library series – it’s genuinely challenging albeit still rewarding trying to keep up. Amongst the first flotilla in the regular release schedule for the year comes Everyday Dust’s The Vale (an imposingly murky and sizzling vampiric electronic score to a “horror film that never happened”), Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan’s Interim Report, March 1979 (a hauntological utopian/dystopian concept LP about the political churn between post-war consensus and early-Thatcherism refracted through the prisms of early-80s Tangerine Dream and Boards of Canada) and – most strikingly of all – Kieran Mahon’s Eternal Return.

Essentially taking an unsettlingly large mallet into the cosier corners of the kosmische woodshed, this philosophically and musically weighty affair makes for a commanding proposition. Although the opening “Excursion” and “There’s No Point Running” – with their nods to both early-Depeche Mode and John Carpenter – are perhaps a tad too sharp in their snare-heavy beats, proceedings segue into more meditative yet still muscular mood-settings across the rest of the record. This translates into the intense celestial fuzz of “Looking Glass”, the arpeggiated clank and gurgle of “This Is This”, the fizzing neo-classical dronescaping of “Our Zack”, the driving buzzing “Für Immer” and the churning whirring of the title track.

Whilst not always an easy listen, Eternal Return is an arresting addition to the darker coves of the Castles in Space catalogue.

Although it seems Tom McDowell initially launched his Library of the Occult enterprise to help stay in sync with his never-shy work rate as Dream Division, he’s been steadily opening the doors to other likeminded purveyors of pentagram-shadowed soundscapes – such as The Psychic Circle, Timothy Fife and OGRE – for stunningly designed vinyl presentations. It was therefore only a matter of time before fellow on/off Polytechnic Youth comrade Jonathan Sharp joined the fold with The Heartwood Institute’s made-to-measure folkloric horror-noir long player Witchcraft Murders.

Billed ambitiously yet obliquely as “an investigation of the Lower Quinton and Hagley Wood Murders” no less, the collection does pretty much what it says on the cobweb-covered tin. Moving through the effervescent low-end dread of “In the Shadow of Meon Hill”, the glitches and drones of “14th February 1945”, the sci-fi dungeon swirling of “Stacung”, the disorientating séance-like warping of “Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm” and the unearthly “Unidentified Remains”, this is unquestionably the densest distillation of The Heartwood Institute’s thematic sound world to date.

While some of us may be a little keener to hear a sequel to Jonathan Sharp’s sublime autobiographical solo-billed Divided Time from 2019, Witchcraft Murders should his keep paganism-curious faithful entranced.

Recorded back in 2018 and now very belatedly making its way to wax on Polytechnic Youth is The Home Current’s long-promised Not Our Kind of Vertigo. Whilst Martin Jensen is still very much testing the capacity limits of his fans’ physical product storage space, the relative distinctiveness of this long player within his omnipresent oeuvre makes it worth squeezing into the shelves. Fashioned specifically with honouring Polytechnic Youth’s unrepentant penchant for late-70s/early-80s electronic minimalism – whilst still retaining his unshakeable sense of finesse and knack for grooves – this eight-part collection indubitably benefits from its stripped-down and sprightly tooling.

Sliding through scene-setting serenity (“A Triffid Ritual”), polished-up C64 video game hyper-burble (“Way Out Cinnamon”), low-slung surf bass-riffing-meets-Radiophonic Workshop effects (“Due Another Soul”), malfunctioning bit-part Star Wars droid does turntable techno (“Slang Guilt”) and early-OMD with a dubby twist (the titular-cut) along the way, Not Our Kind of Vertigo is a retro-leaning yet highly refreshing sonic palate cleanser for The Home Current’s taste buds.

One of two fine February releases from Mat Handley’s still-wonderful Woodford Halse (the other being an esoteric pan-European folk-rock potpourri long player from the London-based Firefay) is the latest full-length product from Charlottesville, Virginia’s Casio keyboard compadres Personal Bandana. Refining upon the templates set out on the duo’s charmingly fuzzy but melodic and sub-editor troubling [sic] cassette/digital album from 2018 – with a wider deployment of synths, keyboards and a smidgen of guitar – This Time It’s… proves to be a slow-burning micro-pleasure.

Occupying a sweet spot somewhere between the bounciest and the balmiest environs of Woodford Halse’s rapidly growing network of extended family and friends, the twosome of Dave Gibson and Travis Thatcher offer up many reasons to be converted to their benevolent cult across the eight congregated recordings.

Thus, they lead us through spacey takes on Apta’s home-brewed blissfulness (“Moon Myths” and “Chloroplasts), friendly nods to Alexis Lumière’s The Casio Stories Vol.2 (“Biofeedback”), cosmic ISAN-meets-Cluster cross-fertilisations (“Radar Maps”), fuzzed-up embryonic Human League propulsions (“Mind Evaporator”) and a glorious imagining of Michael Rother remixing something from Spiritualized’s Pure Phase (“The Edge of Forever”).

Undoubtedly an operation with many hidden-depths still to be exposed, hopefully there will be more to hear from Personal Bandana before their vintage kit wears out.

Not to be outdone by his adroit A&R skills, Mat Handley also self-reissues his own self-titled Pulselovers album from 2016 for a new tape/download incarnation. Despite being a little looser and more stylistically dispersed than 2019’s Cotswold Stone LP for Castles in Space, this is a very worthwhile relaunch with many aural nuggets to be rediscovered within.

Whilst the gorgeous electro-acoustic “Ronco Dreams” and the calming amniotic “Autumn Arrives” connect directly to Cotswold Stone, there are many other avenues visited, some of which showcase Handley’s under-exposed role as a vocalist and lyricist.

Hence, amidst the remaining wordless pieces we’re steered into dark-wave spookiness (“Soundtrack V”), a motorik reframing of the most experimental elements inside Cornershop’s When I Was Born for the 7th Time (“Last Day of Summer”) and some smudged sci-fi electro (“Phantom Cinema”). Even though the vocal-led entries are slightly more uneven, they possess some mercurial magnetism; as attested by the impressive Peter Gabriel-fronts-Remain in Light-era-Talking Heads hybridising of “It’s All in the Detail”, the spoken-word-led Low-tinged eerie languor of “Saturnalia”, the dreamy Emma Barson-voiced “Red Eden, White Nights” and the blatant yet brilliant Joy Division homage that is “Flatlands”.

Don’t let this largely terrific smorgasbord of an album slip past your collection this time around.

Adrian
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