The Space Between: June 2019

Stewart Gardiner’s The Space Between column is intended to pull together reviews that almost never were, preventing them from falling through the cracks

The Leaf Library’s About Minerals is a sensory deprivation tank of experimental sometimes-pop out of London and, rather appropriately, released on Berlin label Inner Space Travels. The subjective reality of the present is evoked through field recordings and exploded room ambience. “About Minerals” exists on the edge of the ocean, a wave-like motorik pulse and vocal delivery recalling Trish Keenan in her most dream pop state. It’s an enveloping experience – to be worn like a coat thought lost back in childhood. Impossible that it should still fit, yet fit it does. “Highlight” then emerges as a counterpoint, its sound design the sonic equivalent of nature reclaiming an industrialised landscape. Dean Hurley and Stalker might be useful points of reference as the immersion into a deep zone takes place in gradations.

The sustained drone-folk of “Surface Decisions” contains clues towards Mogwai playing on a distant star. Whereas “An Edge, An Ending” employs crackle and drums around SF edges. Imagine Professor Brian Cox excitedly discussing the birth of life in the universe, before succumbing to the profundity of it all and letting the music do the talking. Millions of years accelerate in a matter of five minutes.

Melo Disko by Carnet De Voyage (on Gare Du Nord) begins in the room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrickian electronics that are ornate and classical; future/past piano; the distinct feeling that a symphony is occurring in the same place and at the same time, but at an interdimensional remove. The Black Monolith decides to recast itself as a Jean-Michel Jarre figure conducting a light show at the end of human existence and its rebirth. This is “Black Mole” – antiquated distant future house music.

Carnet De Voyage have developed a particular aesthetic that allows room for different moods and varied expression. That it doesn’t always quite hang together feels less a failing than a choice. Sometimes the promise of a 4/4 beat is almost too much to take and in holding back there’s perhaps some disappointment when it doesn’t deliver. Not so with the title track, however, which pulls the different threads of the album together and satisfies with an acid house squelch before its end. But it’s the rudimentary synth and bleep of “Permit to Drive”, with its studied synth-pop vocals and post-punk rhythms, that will deliver most efficiently on discerning dancefloors.

I recall having a recurring dream as a child where certain objects in my house were out of scale. It wasn’t in an Alice in Wonderland way either. They looked and felt wrong, yet it was near-impossible to pinpoint why that was the case. The feeling bled over into waking life and I would experience moments as if back inside the dream. It wasn’t pleasant. There’s a distinct sense that Paul Prudence, with his Ficciones LP (on NLS), has got impossibly close in on the world, peeling back layers of the quotidian to expose the living engine underneath. The creak of a door becomes the the sound of the inanimate gaining life; slowly, painfully. Solitary phone bleeps compete with ice cubes falling into glasses, as surfaces open up and the everyday is heightened and revealed as other. Prudence’s detailing is rigorous yet never cold and he maintains a command of tone and space. Much occurs in each track at a micro-level. He navigates this in such a way that it doesn’t feel crowded in there – below the surface, behind the curtain. Ficciones is the world zoned in on and amplified through drones, musique concrète, field recordings and synth. It might be considered the underside to Not Waving’s Futuro (Music For The Waldorf Project), another work of intensity that defies the ambient label.

Vanishing Twin’s The Age of Immunology (Fire Records) didn’t so much creep up on me, as adopt guerrilla tactics to capture and convert me to its cause. It wasn’t that I required much convincing, but for whatever reason I hadn’t been fully exposed to the band previously. Like rays of light through the dankest of clouds, Vanishing Twin’s internationalist makeup and outlook is beautifully realised throughout the LP.  

The electronic psychedelic charge of “KRK (At Home in Strange Places)” recalls Broadcast circa The Noise Made by People. Whilst “Magician’s Success” seems like an alchemically enhanced collaboration between The Pastels and Broadcast – “The noise of hope is like a racket in my heart”, sings Cathy Lucas and that vividly describes the experience. It’s the sound of pursuing your dreams and realising them in the moment. The Broadcast comparisons aren’t empty, but neither are Vanishing Twin copyists. It’s clear that they mine some of the same influences and in the absence of Broadcast, groups like Vanishing Twin and Lake Ruth are a lifeline. Elsewhere, “You Are Not an Island” evokes melting dream objects and “Planète Sauvage” boasts a subterranean hip-hop groove – more Money Mark than NWA – and is redolent of French esoterica with its spoken word passages hinting at Gainsbourg or Godard.

“Backstroke” slithers out of the speakers like Jaydee’s “Plastic Dreams” with hints of “White Lines”, and crafted through analogue warmth in an underground bunker. Its slow techno radiophonic pulse is utterly infectious. But it is “Cryonic Suspension May Save Your Life” that took hold of me and wouldn’t let go on that first listen. It has surely been beamed in from the edge of the universe, a motorik journey brimming with unknown life forms. The perfectly judged instrumental beginning keeps building and building, burrowing its way into consciousness and finally exposing the light as it bursts into shimmering pop magic around the halfway mark. I would be quite happy to let it go on forever.

After leaving the forever room, I climb up The Borametz Tree. The first album from C Joynes & The Furlong Bray is earthy and vibrant experimental folk released via Thread Recordings (and Feeding Tube in the US). “Triennale” sets the scene and it is one where the deep past encroaches upon the present. C Joynes’s off-kilter guitar is rooted in disparate folk traditions – a global rather than local model – and is therefore not restricted by notions of traditionalism. Each composition is unchained, free to explore. Never is that more true than on “Hamasien Wedding Song” which keels drunkenly to the rhythms of its own drum. There’s a Pete Seeger number buried somewhere within, as performed by some avant-folk iteration of Bruce Springsteen. Lopsided, unconventional and giddy, it’s the sound of the kitchen sink tumbling down the stairs as it is being worked on by the mice from Bagpuss.

The party is over and the sheen of reality falls away. Disintegrating visuals shimmer like a veil, which I find myself inexplicably wrapped up in like a blanket. It is a good fit, although not necessarily comforting. Pictogram is the musical alias of designer, illustrator and Miracle Pond label owner, Nick Taylor. Trace Elements is a cassette-assisted descent into uncanny VHS zones that stirs up synthetic memories; half-remembered, as if heard through a haze.

Opener “Build an Arp” is itself worth the price of admission. At over ten minutes in length, mood is sustained and manipulated. It begins in the borderlands, emerging out of the endless realm to linger for a time in ours. As a piece it wouldn’t be out of place alongside Pye Corner Audio’s The House in the Woods project or Black Mountain Transmitter’s Black Goat of the Woods (terrifying forests clearly figure in my thinking). Decayed synth lines pulsate in the near-darkness, allowing navigation through the gloom. “Build an Arp” is a drawn out journey over the threshold, for the space it occupies is not thin; crossing over takes days, months or years.

The ghost loops of “Losing Light” are suggestive of Solaris. A crackle escapes slowly like air from a tire. These events, it seems to say, have happened before and will happen again. Spiralling down through the floor, understanding left behind as so much flotsam. Meanwhile, “Mothlight” scores a too-realistic enactment of Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian”; bass-heavy with disintegrating synthesiser walls.

Trace Elements is a work of depth and intricacy, containing deep level worlds akin to endless cities imagined in Inception. They are worlds that offer retreat and I challenge you not to get lost, to climb back out if you have the will to do so. But that might be too much to ask.