Pye Corner Audio – Hollow Earth (Ghost Box)

Pye Corner Audio’s third LP for Ghost Box is a future classic of dark potentiality and evocative sonic world building with a core of Space Age optimism

Pye Corner Audio is music to retreat into. That Hollow Earth literalises that retreat into a fully realised narrative descent makes it all the more appealing. A conceptual continuation from previous Ghost Box album Stasis, here the sleepers awake from chambers in a deep space transport only to find themselves submerged in sensory deprivation tanks; their eyes open upon primordial pasts rather than distant futures.

I first encountered Martin Jenkins’s Pye Corner Audio back in 2012, with Black Mill Tapes Vol. 3 as my gateway drug. What I didn’t realise then – and which is painfully obvious in retrospect – was that I was going through a prolonged period of depression. The haunted sounds of Pye Corner Audio and others provided a lifeline of sorts, although I didn’t understand at the time that I needed to hold on to anything. It was the immersive, darkly cinematic quality of Pye Corner’s music that pulled me in. That Jenkins held up a broken to mirror to the techno I listened to as a teenager in the 1990s hardwired the sounds to my past, present and future. Perhaps with a little more self-awareness I would have sought out more obviously joyful music (although to be fair I was also listening to Belbury Poly’s Belbury Tales, whose shadows are at least under daylight), but I don’t think so. I suspect it has to do with the idea that the unheimlich is perfectly fitting under such psychological conditions. If the home is no longer a place of retreat for the self then maybe that is when the un-home may provide temporary residence. Pye Corner Audio is never about comfort – although the thought that Sleep Games is my five-year-old’s favourite album is strangely comforting – but listening to Hollow Earth does feel like coming home to an unfamiliar place.

The sonic world building of the album is apparent from the opening title track. Like the shifts between (un)realities in David Cronenberg’s Existenz you are here in the quotidian / then you are there in the elsewhere. This particular elsewhere is a dancefloor at the edge of time, the rising and falling synths making you feel alone in a crowded room. “Descent” is where the mission begins: psychonauts clamber into metallic chambers which are released down into the earth, physical journey and lucid dreaming occurring simultaneously. The vocodered voice is urgent in a way that suggests a counterpoint with “Lost Ways” from Stasis. After that it’s into the shadows and through arterial corridors, treading lightly so as not to slip away into the inky dark. Then “Mindshaft” lands and it’s as if thousands of lights have been switched on at once and a vast alien cavern populated with temporary man-made structures is illuminated. “Mindshaft” is a pure expression of early house music, as if made out of air and filtered through Pye Corner Audio interiority. It soars underneath its own surfaces, demands repeat immersion and is up there with the finest Pye Corner Audio transmissions.

“Imprisoned Splendour” is beautiful subterranean electronica, suggesting that desolate Ballardian playgrounds also exist near the planetary core. Meanwhile, the slow throb of “The Seventh Labyrinth” shows that sensuality isn’t absent in the great underneath. It’s difficult to break tracks away from the implied narrative and examine them under the microscope. The album flows like underground rivers or a mycelium network, each and every pathway beckoning to be explored in(de)finitely. The icy SF of “Buried Memories” points towards the synth majesty of “Surfacing” which slowly and inexorably uplifts into ellipsis.

Hollow Earth is ripe with dark potentiality, although that’s not to suggest it’s a wholly dark journey. There’s a Space Age optimism that runs through its core, an open curiosity in the potential of sound and music to affect. The interiors of the album are vast and intimate. Abandoned cities as in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, but rendered in Brutalist lines instead of cyclopean shapes. The room at the end of Kubrick’s 2001, with time collapsed and cosmic renewal made possible within an individual. Pye Corner Audio plays with scale and disguises hope within shadows. That Hollow Earth does all these things and more marks it out as a future classic.