Pye Corner Audio - Entangled Routes / The Hardy Tree - Stagdale Part 2

A double bill of Ghost Box and Clay Pipe, with Pye Corner Audio and The Hardy Tree making sonic journeys into speculative fiction

Nostalgia is an empty road that, like me, you’ve probably wandered many times. We say that a story is about the journey rather than the destination, but what if there is no destination to speak of and nothing along the way has any substance to it? That’s the problem when your story is about trying to live in the past once more. Ghost Box Records and Clay Pipe Music don’t actually deal in nostalgia and certainly should not be defined by it, despite the context through which they are often considered. Both labels have instead always excelled at imaginative world building, which has allowed them to interrogate past, present and elsewhere in aesthetically unique ways from intriguing vantage points. Their approach might therefore be usefully viewed through the lens of speculative fiction, which is intriguingly what Pye Corner Audio and The Hardy Tree lean into on their respective latest releases for Ghost Box and Clay Pipe.

Pye Corner Audio’s Entangled Routes has in fact been billed as the third entry in a high concept SF trilogy for Ghost Box, following on from Stasis (2016) and Hollow Earth (2019). Here Martin Jenkins takes listeners on a journey through mycelial networks, as if utilising psilocybin to recreate the effects of a galaxy-hopping spore drive; somewhere between Altered States and Star Trek then. Thus spacey synths, slow-and-spare techno chug and full sonic immersion is the order of the day. Unlike much of the current synth scene, Pye Corner Audio’s work is informed by club culture and Entangled Routes is another evocative portrait of post-rave dystopia. Equivalent practitioners might therefore be sought outside of the usual haunts, with Space Afrika’s post-soundsystem experimental night-time music springing to mind. What these sounds have in common is that they hold echoes of the past yet offer passage into the future.

The Hardy Tree is the musical project of illustrator and Clay Pipe owner Frances Castle, and the Stagdale Part 2 EP has all the conceptual framework it needs since it accompanies the second instalment of her Stagdale graphic story. Part 1 was set in 1975, with twelve-year-old Kathy uprooted from London to the village of Stagdale. It’s there, in her new house, that she has a vision of what might be a time-displaced figure (rather than ghost?) and later discovers a diary that begins in Berlin, 1938. Part 2 is that story within the story, as we experience the contents of the diary detailing young Max’s escape from Nazi Germany. As you can imagine, it’s a moving narrative (see also Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit novel) and The Hardy Tree’s music beautifully captures Max’s movements across Europe, amplifying the emotions and echoing the machinery of the journey. There’s cascading sadness delivered as big room Morricone; the sound of a train pulling away from the station, leaving more than just a platform behind; and there’s the feeling of snow falling upon a new place that can’t yet be called home. The Hardy Tree’s Stagdale Part 2 is companion to your imagination and magic realism for your ears.