(First published in Issue 103 of Electronic Sound magazine, July 2023)
FAULTY TOWERS
In a secret corner of Yorkshire, a man known only as Craven Faults creates epic modular synth homages to the dark, post-industral moorland that surrounds him. Who is he? We really can’t say
Words: Bob Fischer
“I’ve got friends who I’ve never told about this music,” smiles the man in the car park.
This is already an assignment like no other. He’s charming, and he’s shaking my hand warmly, but I’m not allowed to reveal his name. Or his exact location. In fact, until I’d specifically requested them from his record label the previous day, I’d been maddeningly unaware of these salient details myself. There’s been a whiff of John le Carré about this whole strange, undercover affair, and for weeks I’ve entertained fevered fantasies of a covert rendezvous in overcoat and trilby, throwing chunks of bread to unsuspecting West Yorkshire wildfowl. Tonight, Dmitri, the geese fly south to Wakefield…
Nevertheless, as I pull up in the car park of a small industrial estate, he is waiting patiently amid the grumbling aftermath of a ferocious rainstorm. The mysterious artist known only as Craven Faults. Purveyor of exquisite modular synth soundtracks, all suffused with the dark beauty of the oppressive moorland sprawled all around us. Since 2017’s Netherfield Works there has been a trickle of long-form EPs, plus two hypnotic albums: 2020’s Erratics & Unconformities and the newly-issued Standers. All released pseudonymously, all riddled with the lonely melancholy of long-abandoned mills and mineshafts. To quote his own publicity, these are “half-remembered journeys across post-industrial Yorkshire”.
He smiles, chats politely and takes me indoors, guiding me through a little network of corridors into a modest studio stuffed with ancient tape reels and battered cassettes. He’s wearing a corduroy jacket and he isn’t called Dmitri. I’ve probably said too much already. So why the anonymity? He shrugs as he carefully decants the coffee. A partial influence, he explains, were a series of now-legendary psychedelic compilations that became essential “artyfacts” for any self-respecting 1970s prog-head.
“I loved all that 1960s stuff, the Nuggets and the Pebbles albums,” he explains. “I picked up the Pebbles albums in the record shop at Leeds University in about 1980. They were shutting down and they had ten volumes for a quid each, so I bought the lot. There were all these bands like The Fe-Fi-Four Plus 2, and you’d think… do they really exist? Or this a joke? And I didn’t really want to know.
“But there was nothing deliberate with me. When I did the first EP, Tony at The Leaf Label heard it and said ‘Let’s just keep it anonymous. We’ll put it out and see what happens’. There was no plan. And we’re still putting it out and seeing what happens. It’s almost taken on a life of its own. Sometimes, in some respects, it doesn’t really feel much like me…”
The bleak solitude of the Yorkshire countryside, though? The psychic scars of long-defunct industry? These are clearly personal interests. At first he seems a little reticent to agree, but then he slowly warms to the suggestion.
“Well it’s instrumental music, so it’s not really about anything,” he says. “But because it’s instrumental music, your character comes into it. When I drive to the studio, I come over the hills and I can just see into the National Park. Rombalds Moor has hundreds of neolithic carved rocks. And disused quarries. And old farm buildings that have been abandoned. It’s all human intervention really, and I became interested in that.”
So not just the landscape itself, but the impact of thousands of years’ of human behaviour upon it? He nods.
“I like nosing about. Even when I lived in the city, I realised at an early age that, if you’re walking around looking at the shops, there are far more interesting things to see above the shop windows than through the shop windows. Or you might look down the side of a shop, and there’ll be an old gas lamp. And you think ‘How the hell has that managed to stay there for 120 years?’ There used to be one down the side of WHSmiths in Leeds.
“And I like the rusty bits of metal you find attached to walls. There’s one not far from here, a beautiful bit of curved metalwork. It’s just the broken end of a gate, but it’s still attached to the old gatepost. I love the fact that it’s still there, and there’s no need to clear it away.”
The tipping point, the moment when this gentle fascination solidified into the music of Craven Faults, began with a leisurely ramble around the tiny village of Hebden. Not, he pointedly explains, to be confused with West Yorkshire hipster hangout, Hebden Bridge. This Hebden is an altogether sleepier outpost, halfway between Grassington and Appletreewick.
“I could see a chimney in the distance,” he recalls. “The remains of Yarnbury Lead Mine. All the spoil heaps are grassed over now, but the ground is still rough. And there used to be 5000 people living in that valley, but now they’ve all gone. It was a town, and now it’s not. And I found that really interesting – the way that urban places can become rural places.”
So is it the simple transience of human endeavour that intrigues him? Or the fact that it can’t be erased completely? Lingering echoes will always remain, even if they’re covered in grass or just attached to old fenceposts.
“I think it’s time,” he says. “I’m interested in time as a concept. My grandma was born in 1899, and she lived well into her nineties, so I knew her well. She said her earliest memory was going over a humpbacked bridge on a horse and cart when she was two years old – so that was 1901. That’s quite a connection with a world that has changed. It just fascinated me that she was born during a time when nobody had flown… and then, before she was 70, there were men on the moon. That’s quite extraordinary.
“As a kid, I always wanted to be an archaeologist, but someone said you needed A-Levels for it. And I only have one. In Art.”
Let’s do some personal archaeology, then. The artist now known as Craven Faults was born in Bradford, and lived there until the age of eight. Then, after a brief foray to Lancashire, his family settled in Northamptonshire. Aged 20, he returned to West Yorkshire as an art student at Leeds Polytechnic, but his teenage experiences in the Midlands had already proved transformative.
“We lived in a village,” he recalls. “And that got me into music, because there was nothing else to do. There wasn’t really any public transport, and they wouldn’t let you into the pub because everyone knew you were only 16. So I occupied myself listening to records and messing around with electric guitars. Then, in October 1976, I saw Kraftwerk in Coventry. Between me and my friend Dave, we had all their albums. I had the first two and Autobahn, Dave had Ralf And Florian and Radio Activity. So we were fans.”
Was it well-attended, I wonder? A friend of mine saw Kraftwerk on their 1975 tour, in the cavernous main room of Middlesbrough Town Hall, and recalls the audience being sparse and – indeed – somewhat bemused.
“No, it was busy,” he insists. “It was a hippy crowd. People sat cross-legged on the floor back then, they paid attention! And I remember a massive cheer when they started ‘Autobahn’. Then, about two months later, I saw the classic line-up of Tangerine Dream in Birmingham. I was 16, Virgin Records had reissued all their albums, and John Peel played ‘Fly And Collision Of Comas Sola’ on the radio. It started with that synthy sound and lots of reverb, and I just thought it was brilliant – I’d never heard of them. Three days later they were in Birmingham and I got tickets at the last minute, right in the middle of the second row. It was phenomenally loud.”
And his own musical adventures?
“I was in a post-punk band from 1979. This is going to give it all away, isn’t it?”
Go on, which band? He’s making it sound like they might have been quite famous.
“Maybe this should be the article that tells everyone?” He pauses, and breaks into a smile. “Nah…”
Tell me, then. I promise I won’t include it in the feature.
“Give over!”
He does tell me, though. And I am true to my word, but let’s at least do the backstory.
“In 1979, I was in a screenprinting room at college and there was a lad there doing some posters for the art school party,” he continues. “He said ‘Have you got a band? Come and play’. This was on the Thursday, and the gig was on the Monday. I hadn’t actually got a band, but we’d always talked about it so we worked out three songs and turned up. We just did experimental post-punk. No drummer. Just guitar, bass, and a singer with an old violin. We were on for about ten minutes and the punks absolutely hated it. We used to get so much abuse for not playing punk. But there was a guy there who ran a fanzine, and he reviewed it and loved it. So we threw ourselves in at the deep end.”
If you’ve an interest in finer details of the British post-punk scene of the late 1970s, you might be aware of his first band. But you’re more likely to have heard of the band with whom he toured America and Europe in the late 1980s. Or, indeed, his contributions to…
No. That’s going too far.
So, the new album. It’s called Standers, and it’s terrific.
“The cover is the Nine Standards Rigg,” he explains. “They’re nine cairns up in Cumbria. And the thing I find really interesting? There haven’t always been nine of them. Sometimes it’s been a dozen, sometimes less. And they haven’t always been in that place – they’re constantly being rebuilt. So I like the fact that it’s an ancient monument… but is it ancient? It’s like the Ship of Theseus, or George Washington’s Axe. I find that funny.”
He’s fascinating, and part of that fascination is that he actively denies being fascinating. He’s gentle and genial, a modest autodidact. The name Craven Faults itself? “Three geological faults that run roughly east-west across the southern Yorkshire Dales”. The titles on the new album, as ever, reflect archaic Yorkshire dialect and the tangled etymology of local place names. ‘Odda Delf’ intrigues me, I tell him. Wasn’t she a Norse Goddess?
“No, it’s a quarry,” he chuckles. “On one of the old maps it’s called Todda, but I reckon whoever made the map must have asked a local what it was called, and they said ‘T’Odda’.”
There’s a grand tradition being followed here, isn’t there? Men in sheds humbly dabbling in harmless hobbies, but – in doing so – amassing mindboggling swathes of esoteric knowledge. He shows me a 19th century map of my own home town on the National Library of Scotland website. We discuss the 1930s books of Yorkshire historians Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley, then switch in a blink to The Pop Group and Laurie Spiegel. And his interest in synths? Given his five-decade love of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, surely he was an early adopter? Surprisingly not.
“I’m quite late to synthesizers,” he insists. “The first one I bought was a Wasp in the early 2000s.”
The massive modular set-up that dominates an entire wall of the studio is, he reveals, barely a decade old.
“I lived in a little back-to-back terraced house in Leeds,” he recalls. “My best friend died and we all got left some money in his will. Mine was enough to put a deposit on a house. It wasn’t a very expensive house, it had no central heating and no double glazing. And then, when I finally got some money together to do the place up… I bought this. So I had a massive, expensive synthesizer and a freezing cold house.”
He sets off a pulsating modular loop, and I prod an aimless finger around the vintage Farfisa organ whose unmistakeable tones are weaved seamlessly throughout Standers. It’s a sound, I suggest, that links those hypnotic modular sequences with the acid-fried psych of his beloved ‘60s beat groups. He nods.
“I can make connections between Kraftwerk’s ‘Radio Activity’ and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)’,” he says. “That one note thing… ‘dum dum dum’. I’ve always loved that. The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ has got that one-note cello… ‘dum dum dum’ again. There’s something about one note that I just find fascinating. Often I’ll record something, and I’ll do something really clever on the synthesiser with shifts and changes. But then I’ll go back and re-record it with just a couple of notes. I just prefer it that way. The more I take out of tracks, the better I like them.”
And, just to be even more contrary… he’s actually playing live. No, really. Four performances over a weekend in September, all at a heritage watermill on the outskirts of Leeds. They sold out in a heartbeat. Surely that’s going to blow his cover? Or is he going to come out in a mask, like Kendo Nagasaki? He chuckles at the prospect.
“I’ll be facing away from the audience, sitting at this…” he smiles, airily gesturing towards that towering, modular monolith. “And I think afterwards, it’ll just be the same. I don’t put my name on the records, and I don’t really do any social media anyway. Nothing’s going to change.”
He should, I suggest, be collected by a black limousine at the watermill door as the last electronic pulse is still echoing around the rafters. And then what do we both say? It’s inevitable. We chant it together, in cod mid-Atlantic accents and in perfect, precise unison.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Craven Faults has left the building…”
Standers is available here:
https://cravenfaults.bandcamp.com/album/standers
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