Castles in Space brings forth a bounteous compendium of creativity captured in lockdown conditions, for a charitable cause

Having already ambitiously-assembled choice cuts from the great and the good of the current electronic music world for the retro-conceptual Scarred for Life compilation late last year, Castles in Space has cast its net much further with The Isolation Tapes. Distilled from 250 or so submissions, received off the back of a social media invite for new home-baked material recorded in lockdown living conditions strictly between 23rd March and 17th April 2020, this sprawling 62-track collection – spread over CD, cassette and download bundles – is a somewhat staggering example of finely-tuned quality control, agile A&R skills and mastering/sequencing ingenuity.

With reassuring inevitably, prolific artists directly or indirectly attached to the Castles in Space world reliably turn in the goods. This includes The Home Current dropping in A Certain Ratio-infused voodoo rhythms workout (“On the Subject of Appropriate Band Names”); Polypores unpeeling more meditative modular-synth layers (“Abstract Gardening”); clocolon chopping-out some gripping acid house psych shapes (“Innerspaces”); The Twelve Hour Foundation forging squelchy glam-funk from Moogs and recycling-bin-content samples (“Lock-in”); and The Heartwood Institute’s Jonathan Sharp encapsulating the mood of deserted streets with inside-outside collaging (“The World Without Us”).

Outside the inner-CiS-family-circle, proceedings stretch out into likeminded as well as sonically distanced destinations. Hence, across the more musically-adjacent terrain comes two luminous Listening Center micro-electro nuggets (“Sun Focus” and “Unconfident Days”); blissful electro-burbling from Salvatore Mercatante (“Artefacts of the Age”); Vic Mars back in the playful analogue electronics mode we last heard properly on The Consumer Programme LP (“Skylight”); gliding ambient-techno from Steve Nolan (“Cowboys”); hauntological enigma-encoding from Revbjelde (“Death Moves”); glistening Another Green World-like loveliness from Apta (“Sun”); and mesmeric dronescaping from Fea and Twenty Three Hanging Trees (“Hand Glass”).

Moving beyond the more companionable stylistic clustering, things poke into some interesting esoteric corners. Thus, we’re treated to the gorgeous art-pop songcraft of Hattie Cooke (“I Get By”); the serene Steve Reich-meets-Jean Michel Jarre repetitions of Monochrome Echo (“The Stranger”); hypnotic Durutti Column-indebted sculpting from Hawksmoor (“La Peste”); the eerie lysergic-pastoralism of Rebecca Denniff (“To the Greenwood We Will Go”); the spacey Laurie Andersonisms of Plain Jane Superbrain (“For Some the Stars Are Our Guides”); and the evocative European filmic panoramas of British Stereo Collective (“Circle of Isolation”).

With so much content on offer, of course not everything reaches top-drawer standards over the expansive totality of The Isolation Tapes. Yet whilst there might be a few weaker moments to be found here and there, certainly nothing detracts from the overall cohesive listening flow and new pleasures are to be uncovered on each encounter, which is a remarkable and admirable achievement for something conceived in a time of such anxiety and adversity for many. In short, this is an absolute-must for those who have been in thrall to the Castles in Space story so far but who are also open to broadening their aural horizons.

castlesinspace.bandcamp.com

Adrian
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