Plone – Puzzlewood (Ghost Box)

Retro-futurists Plone return after two decades with Puzzlewood, a magical mechanical mystery record that couldn’t be more at home on Ghost Box

With Puzzlewood, Ghost Box invite eager listeners to climb into that great glass elevator and take a trip with cosmonauts of inner space Plone. Embark upon a joyous journey into electronic psychedelia that is as slyly addictive as e-numbers and as delightfully nourishing as chewing three course dinner gum. The manner in which Puzzlewood was created is itself no small marvel, for Billy Bainbridge and Mike Johnston pulled together recordings made across the past twenty or so years. The final product might therefore be expected to be rather disjointed and strained, but this is a cohesive work of art that remains light on its feet throughout.

Plone might be new to Ghost Box, but it isn’t as if they have just been bussed into the town of Belbury with no prior connections to the non-place. An afternoon spent studying faded micro-film records in the Belbury public library reveals new town planning that references the work of the Birmingham retro-futurists. It must therefore be considered that Plone were an influence all along. That they can so easily be slotted into the quotidian otherworld of the Ghost Box label is in no small part due to their “lost” second album. Puzzlewood is officially viewed as their third LP, yet a follow-up to their debut For Beginner Piano (Warp, 1999) never emerged, despite rumours surrounding bootlegged demos in the early 2000s. Like a street that ominously skips a house number, perhaps that second album can only be heard by employing the aural equivalent of looking where you never want to look, behind you out the corner of your eye.

“Years and Elements” sets the mood with breezy, primary coloured electronica that drifts and squelches. Hints of a fourth world and a droplet of darkness dispensed on the way out show that there is more at play than the lovely immediate. Indeed, the addition of a horn on “Miniature Magic” has Plone dabbling in lounge music whilst crafting a lopsided children’s television theme from a bygone era. If Boards of Canada filtered their sort-of-nostalgia through a gauze – like listening to the past down a tunnel – then Plone have excavated that feeling of now from then and presented it on the surface in the present. The title track is an eerily jaunty head nodder and floor throbber; think the odder realms of Warp and Mo’ Wax as conducted by a dark mage Geoffrey from Rainbow. “Day Trip” takes things in a different direction as it closes the side. A neon dream disco cut that shimmers and glows, like Patrick Cowley collaborating with Jon Brooks across space-time and captured in amber.

Plone plunge into side two with “Just a Shadow”. It is nothing less than Grange Hill reconfigured as a show about adepts of Cthulhu navigating their teenage years, with multiple scenes of ancient, rotting texts being read behind bike sheds. “Sunvale Run” extracts the sugary goodness from novelty hardcore such as “Sesame’s Treat” and calmly delivers miniature toytown almost-rave as a result. Weirdly, listening to this doesn’t feel as if you have been guzzling sweets like Augustus Gloop. The more plaintive aspects of the album are given space to breathe on “The Model Village”, which would make a fine bedfellow with the pastoral electronics of Vic Mars’s Clay Pipe Music output. “Circler” gets gentler and more fragile, the shifting currents of a stream reflected in at least the suggestion of keys and strings, momentarily recalling Erland Cooper’s musings on Scottish waters. There’s a feeling that this aching beauty runs through the core of Puzzlewood, but is only exposed in moments. Nor is this less-than-a-theory contradicted by the trilogy of giddily bleeping ZX Spectrum platform game soundtracks that close the record. The Ebeneezer Goode old egg Dizzy of “Chalk Stream”, Charlie Bucket meets Pacman of “Sarcelle” and the quest completed skip off into the pixelated dawn of “Sweet Factory”. These are music box pleasure machines that put a smile on the face and manage to cut deeper on repeat listens.

Plone have crafted a series of memorable delights that positively crackle with imagination. For Puzzlewood is a mood lifter and head scratcher, offering inventive electronics to intrigue, excite and unburden.

Ghost Box Records

Puzzlewood Bandcamp