Winter is creeping in but the new releases still continue to appear, with Adrian making another bundled attempt to keep pace, prior to our yuletide pausing

Many of us might feel like tucking ourselves into a nice box of straw and sleeping-out the winter months but the moral obligations to keep documenting the artists that orbit the Concrete Islands world still continue. Here below then, is another seasonally-shaped round-up of things that might otherwise have gone undocumented as the music industry transitions into Christmas-period mode.

With a roll-call of contributors that reads like a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the Concrete Islands publishing schedule for 2019 and with all proceeds going to Cancer Research, the multi-artist Scarred for Life CD compilation on Castles in Space is pretty much a must-buy from the outset. Assembled in homage to the esoteric storytelling and soundtracks of 70s/80s British small-screen sci-fi/horror shows and public information films that were aimed primarily at children, this collection is tailored at forty-to-fifty-somethings with a certain sub-section of cult TV memories. There is some genuinely engrossing and dark matter to be found within, from the reliable likes of The Heartwood Institute, Keith Seatman, The Home Current, Dalham, The Soulless Party and Polypores, who all deliver suitably shadowy synth-soaked delights, with some disembodied voices added in places.

However, there is also lighter material in-between times for self-balancing levity. Hence, The Twelve-Hour Foundation usher in a passage of wobbly Radiophonic Workshop warmth; The Central Office of Information add some squelchy vintage TV science programme-style electro-pop; Pulselovers bring some balmy electro-organics; and Vic Mars supplies a portion of pastoral quirkiness. With an admirably-high level of quality control and an infectious communal commitment to the overarching concept, Scarred for Life is a selection ripe for those who might once have been given school years sleepless nights by episodes of Doctor Who, Chocky and the still-troubling Tripods as well as those traumatised by Charlie Says and films about ill-fated attempts to retrieve frisbees from electrical sub-stations.

A super-group of sorts, led by hammered dulcimer-player Joel Hanson (Judgement of Paris) and featuring guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Richard Adams (Hood, The Declining Winter, Western Edges), violinist Sarah Kemp (Lanterns on the Lake, Brave Timbers, Last Harbour), pianist Gareth S Brown (Hood) and multi-instrumentalist Chris Cole (Movietone, Manyfingers), Memory Drawings have been steadily carving out a niche for their cinematic Morricone-tinged moodscapes across Second Language, Hibernate, Zozaya Records and their own Signal Records label since 2014. Now they shift over to Greece’s Sound in Silence with a beautifully-repackaged edition of 2018’s very limited Phantom Lights tour CD. Picking-up from where 2017’s amorphous The Nearest Exit long-player left-off but slimming things down to a six-track mini-album size serves them exceedingly well. Now additionally joined on vocals by Yvonne Bruner (Big Hat) for two pieces, this feels like the product of a band increasingly comfortable with extending creative democracy and stylistic reach.

Thus, the yearning hazy rustic flavours of “The Other Side” open proceedings hauntingly before the dextrous ensemble glide through the polyrhythmic post-folk of the title-track, the bucolic orchestrated blissfulness of “Two Rooms” and “The Final Curtain”, a glitchy ghostly remix of “There Is a Last Time for Everything” (originally found on The Nearest Exit) by Barnaby Carter and the radiant vocal-topped closer “Captured”. In all, Phantom Lights could be one of the most go-to Memory Drawings studio outings.

Having adroitly remoulded some of her most directly-delivered songs from 2017’s Modern Kosmology within this year’s more electro-framed Loops in the Secret Society LP, Jane Weaver takes another detour with a fresh side-project set under the Fenella alias, with the help of long-serving accomplices Peter Philipson and Raz Ullah. Released via her now-stable home at Fire Records, this eponymous vinyl/digital-only collection reimagines the score to Marcell Jankovics’ 1981 cult animation Fehérlófia. Largely recorded in a remote cottage on the Applecross Peninsula in north west Scotland, the album is one of Weaver’s most expansive and heady collections to date.

Whilst still veering heavily down the synth-saturated kosmische-meets-ambient avenues of her recent solo-billed works (“Bright Curse”, “Triangular Journey” and “Shard of Glass”), the trio also spread-out further into guitar-churning psych-rock (“Rock Creature”, “Occurring in Waves” and “Transfiguration Into One”), prowling John Carpenter-esque sci-fi soundscapes (“Battle” and “The Seed”), lysergic pastoralism (“Echo Chamber of Your Heart”), choppy Neu!-meets-Steve Reich repetitions (“Gilded Greens”), shades of Mark Peters’s hypnotic Innerland (“Rotation Wells”) and even a touch of effects-drenched drowsy shoegaze (“Slow Swoop”). With the vocal-led pieces sometimes foggily blurring into the instrumental interludes, the album sometimes lacks crisp definition. Yet stepping back a little, to listen to it as a two-part sequence of meticulously-meshed movements, its allure becomes more intoxicating with each flip and spin.

Seemingly having a tacit contest with The Home Current’s Martin Jensen, on who can put out the most amount of material across the widest range of formats and via the biggest selection of labels throughout 2019, Stephen James Buckley concludes his impressive run of releases this year with two more under his primary Polypores guise. The lovingly-assembled lathe-cut Additional Flora 7” bundle on Castles in Space does pretty much what it says on the tin, in providing two murky yet soothing outtakes from the nature-meets-electronica-immersions of the still-formidable Flora LP from earlier this year.

Contrastingly, the cassette/digital Brainflowers, via the fledgling Miracle Pond label, cleaves closer to the self-released tape/download Radiance collection from a few months back, by ploughing even deeper and wider into sprawling mesmeric modular-synth pastures, with even more stunning results. Therefore, across the ten gathered tracks, Buckley ekes-out all manner of serene mechanisations, phased drones, gamelan chimes, discombobulated interstellar bleeps and otherworldly reverberations, with some masterful craftmanship and calmness. It will certainly be very interesting to see how Buckley seeks to top such a strong body of work from the last twelve months in 2020.

Adrian
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