A further seasonal sift through a warming pile of small, medium and off-piste wares, to help us see and hear out the winter period

It’s too easy to forget that winter can be far longer and more oppressive until we return again to linger in yet another of its closing halves. Whilst dark and cold days can add an atmospheric layer in the run up to yuletide festivities at a year’s end, starting another annum with restrictive daylight and grim weather is considerably less enjoyable. Yet there is always music to coax us slowly towards the lighter and less damp days of spring. 2020 is certainly already awash with produce from in and around our favourite sources. Hence, the necessity to pool-together another clutch of less demonstrative but no less important releases that might otherwise have slipped through our review filters.

Sustaining its high quality/quantity combinations, the ever-reliable Castles in Space has delivered two very limited-edition long-players to sit between bigger 2020 agenda-setting albums from K(laüs), The Soulless Party and Keith Seatman. The first comes in the form of Bernard Grancher’s sublime Aveugle Etincelle. Surrounded by artwork in homage to early-80s post-punk and industrial greyness, this 9-track 49-minute cassette (with download) collection mines rich seams of murkily-mesmeric electronic sounds; sometimes serenely suggesting how Brian Eno might have remoulded Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity and at other times imagining early-Cabaret Voltaire reworking Tom Baker-era Doctor Who soundtracks. Similarly low in numbers and equally as essential comes the CD/digital-only Evocation album from The Relations, the more collaborative alter-ego enterprise of Neil Hale’s Correlations project. Fusing wispy yet ghostly folkloric moodscapes, ripples of In a Silent Way-soaked ambient-jazz and de rigueur but not overly formulaic hauntological sculpting, this immersive headphones-friendly affair is a quietly bounteous treasure-trove to dig up.

Returning to full active duty for 2020 after last year’s career-high solo-billed I Feel Nothing Most Days, Oliver Cherer revisits his Gilroy Mere pseudonym for the first of two scheduled and conceptually-connected sets for Clay Pipe Music. Exploring the nostalgic yet newly-topical history of British railway lines and stations closing by the 1960s Beeching cuts, the three-track Over the Tracks EP (elaborately deployed as a flexi-disc, download and fold-out model station package-deal no less) bodes well for the ensuing full Adlestrop LP due to arrive this coming summer. Exploring utterly gorgeous Steve Reich-meets-Harmonia locomotive rhythms (for the title-track), eerie buddleia and birdsong-encircled deserted signal-hut rustics (“Swallows”) and percussively-propelled trainline simulations (“St Leonards West Marina”), it’s deeply rewarding to find Cherer adding yet another set of strings to his now mile-wide bow.

Contrastingly far more downbeat in its historical and modern-day linkages is 201984 – out via Environmental Studies – from Hawksmoor. With a press release explaining that it is “influenced by geopolitical instability, the break-up of Britain and the pressure on the individual to survive in the current, post-Orwellian landscape” this CD/download album from the alias of the Bristol-based James McKeown is certainly driven by an ominous outlook and possibly informed by a subscription to The New Statesman. Yet, it’s not a straightforwardly stern dystopian statement either. Built from prominent rubbery basslines, Moogs and other electronic elements, the album may stitch-together some very bleak thematic threads but it also revels in some elevating magpie-like sound-accumulations. Veering between the deconstructed dub grooves of Tortoise’s eponymous first long-player, the filmic-noir of ARC Soundtracks, the fizzing and squelching of seminal 70s kosmische practitioners and the dense discombobulations of Throbbing Gristle, 201984 is a foreboding but magnetising creation.

Also in a shadowy zone, yet one infused with less technological authoritarianism and more sinister occultism is Dream Division’s entry into the Bibliotapes ‘soundtracks-for-books’ series. As an unofficial accompaniment to Dennis Wheatley’s disturbing The Devil Rides Out novel from 1934 and only available – so far at least – on 50 cassettes that sold out near-instantly, this could be one of Tom McDowell’s most ambitious Dream Division products to date. It strikingly finds his sonic operations stepping away from retro-sci-fi grooves and heading into more gothic dominions. Replete with passages of tolling bells, ecclesiastical keyboards and funeral percussion alongside the usual array of synths, as well as occasionally leaning into borderline-madrigal arrangements, the album’s ruralist horror cinematics are impressively akin to the visions of The Heartwood Institute rather than the oft-referenced John Carpenter. Whilst it’s a privilege to be one of the few to possess a copy, The Devil Rides Out undoubtedly deserves to heard far more widely.

To lift the spirits out of such gloom – however well-fashioned – is Alexis Lumière’s The Casio Stories Vol.2 on the Paris-based ERR REC label. As one half of Polytechnic Youth protégés Cité Lumière, Alexis has already proved his mettle as an eccentrically-gifted craftsman. Across this second cassette/download volume of solo tracks, cut primarily with vintage Casio synths, he takes things into more infectiously buoyant and soothingly serene directions. In the former respect we can envisage how Kraftwerk’s “Boing Boom Tschak” might have sounded drastically stripped of its sheen (“Introduction”) as well as enjoy a charmingly primitive homage to nascent hip hop (“Roads of Rage”) and in the latter we can find some warming Joe Meek-meets-OMD blissfulness (“Welcome Back”) as well as some watery hymnal space-pop (“Have a Rest My Friend”). Again, although it will have a digital afterlife, The Casio Stories Vol.2 unarguably merits being owned by more than 50 cassette collectors, given that it is one of this year’s most unexpected pleasures to date.

Adrian
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