The Haunted Generation

Reviews originally published in Issue 94 of Electronic Sound magazine, October 2022:

WARRINGTON-RUNCORN NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN
Districts, Roads, Open Space
(Castles In Space)

“The precise planning of New Towns, with specific zones for different activities – working, shopping and living – created an artificial way of life,” argues Gordon Chapman-Fox. “One that failed to understand the sheer messiness of human existence…”

Let’s party, everyone! In, of course, the designated party zone, where trestle tables groan beneath the weight of meat paste sandwiches and a blazer-clad representative of the Noise Abatement Society frowns at the flickering needle of an overworked decibel meter. This is Chapman-Fox’s third album as Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, and his unwavering obsession with the minutiae of 1970s urban regeneration continues to reap splendid reward.

But the mood has changed. Where debut album Interim Report, 1979 and follow-up People & Industry comprised short, sharp shocks of Brutalist, council-issue synth, Districts, Roads, Open Space is more airy, more organic. Opener ‘Golden Square’ is a 13-minute waft of modular pulses, leading into the relentless hum and clatter of ‘Community Square’, possibly the most evocative recreation of 1970s rush-hour traffic ever committed to vinyl. You can smell the sweat patches in the armpits of nylon shirts; feel the summer heat rising from the leather upholstery of grumbling Vauxhall Vivas.  

And that’s half the album done and dusted. Heading from the roads to the open spaces, the lilting synths and gentle beats of ‘Old Hall’ gradually swirl into an ecclesiastic anthem, an inspirational ‘Praise Be’ to the glories of the church jumble sale. And ‘The Key To A New Home Of Your Own’ is the utopian swirl of the upwardly-mobile new estates. A beaming registry office marriage between electronic sweethearts, with Vangelis passing prawn cocktails through the serving hatch while Wolfgang and Florian waltz an upright Hoover round the shag pile.

And to finish? ‘Buzby’s Lullaby’. Here, sleepy bedtime synths mock the unanswered ring of some lachrymose, late-night phone call in homage to the chirpy avian star of British Telecom’s 1970s TV adverts. It’s the perfect summation of Chapman-Fox’s beloved human messiness, and a touching conclusion to an album of delightfully melancholic nostalgia for thwarted suburban dreams.

Album available here:
https://warrington-runcorn-cis.bandcamp.com/album/districts-roads-open-space

JOHANNA WARREN
Lessons For Mutants
(Wax Nine)

Midway through recording, Johanna Warren swapped the sun-drenched buzz of her native LA for a new life in the Welsh countryside. And while it’s commendable that her sixth LP isn’t a concept album about intermittent drizzle, it’s still a collection with a winsomely rustic sound. “If everyone was a colour, you’d be red and I’d be orange,” she sings on acoustic opener ‘I’d Be Orange’. “So I could sit next to you in the rainbow…”

But this is no cutesy nu-folk album. ‘Piscean Lover’ is brassy grunge, and the searing ‘Oaths’ is Aerial-era Kate Bush, complete with jagged violin from Bush’s own nephew, Raven. It comes with lavishly Byronic verse (“O wise, mighty waves / What wicked winds have whipped us into shapes so monstrous and depraved?”) and Warren’s knack for combining the poetic with the confessional pervades throughout. “To me you were a crutch / That I used to help myself feel semi-stable in the moment,” she sings, touchingly, on ‘Hi Res’. An album of steely beauty. 

Album available here:
https://johannawarren.bandcamp.com/album/lessons-for-mutants

RON GEESIN
Sunday Bloody Sunday (OST)
(Trunk)

For over five decades, Ron Geesin has been a puckishly eclectic prankster on the fringes of British electronica, and this welcome collection brings together three of his long-buried TV and film scores. Sunday Bloody Sunday itself was John Schlesinger’s 1971 follow-up to Midnight Cowboy, acclaimed for Murray Head’s groundbreaking depiction of a bisexual sculptor, and Geesin’s soundtrack is appropriately sensitive. ‘Sky High Balloons’ is a graceful dance of classical guitars, ‘Chemical Dreams’ an autumnal jazz daydream with wordless vocals by Bridget St John. ‘Blitzful Memories’, meanwhile, is a sinister rumble hinting at Geesin’s more experimental tendencies.

On the flipside are a joyously rhythmic synth soundtrack to a 1985 documentary about cricketer Viv Richards, and a collection of genuinely disturbing cues from Shapes In A Wilderness, a 1970 BBC examination of art therapy in mental hospitals. All credit to Trunk for collating these important lost pieces of Geesin’s wildly varying musical jigsaw.

Album available here:
https://trunkrecords.greedbag.com/buy/sunday-bloody-sunday-11/

MJ HIBBETT
The Unearthly Beauty Of MJ Hibbett
(Artists Against Success)

As an accomplished troubadour of the trivial, Hibbett is a criminally unsung spiritual cousin of Half Man Half Biscuit. With his trademark C86 jangles now augmented by squelchy synths, he gently rails against wondrously mundane annoyances. ‘The People Who Stand In The Door’? “A bunch of gateway solipsists / Who think that no-one else exists”. But it’s the lo-fi synthpop of ‘Kenny’s Brother Alan’s Stag Do’ that steals the glories. ‘He’s the kind of total wanker who acts like he owns the pub / And he never gets a round in, his name is Nigel Grubb”. Think Adrian Mole with a Casiotone.  

Album available here:
https://mjhibbett.bandcamp.com/album/the-unearthly-beauty-of

THE HEARTWOOD INSTITUTE
Hedges
(Woodford Halse)

Who’s that, hiding in the privet? Why, it’s Cumbria’s own Jonathan Sharp, with an album taking inspiration from his childhood Ladybird book of the same title. And it’s charming. Opener ‘Dogwood’ is a gentle country ramble, the hypnotic tinkle of melodic synths flitting like busy butterflies. But while Sharp claims to have eschewed the darkness of previous albums, it’s not all Cornettos and sunhats. ‘Honeysuckle’ fizzles into faded tape stock, ‘Black Bryony’ is the sinister drone of a sun-drunk wasp. A lazy summer holiday of an album, but with nasty little beasties buzzing in the bushes.

Album available here:
https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/wf-73-hedges

AIRCOOLED
St Leopard’s
(Bandcamp)

Blow the cobwebs off your hot pants, here come Sussex polymath Oliver Cherer and one-time Elastica drummer Justin Welch with a collection of splendidly mesmeric, disco-fuelled work-outs. The 16-minute title track sets the mood, with Cherer’s psychedelic guitar grumbling in the gaps between Welch and bassist Katharine Wallinger’s vice-tight grooves. The influence of Neu! hangs heavy over ‘Offenhausen 360’, while the concluding ‘Supermotodisco’ is so steeped in the legacy of spacey, lycra-clad funk that it’s only missing an accompanying Hot Gossip dance routine.

Album available here:
https://aircooled.bandcamp.com/album/st-leopards

THE HOLOGRAM PEOPLE
Village Of The Snake God
(Library Of The Occult)

“The Hologram People advise no-one to attempt this journey without the correct and proper physical and mental preparation…” Or, indeed, an appreciation of those 1970s Amicus films in which Caroline Munro is lured to swinging Kensington soirées where the mirrors suddenly start dripping blood. It’s Dom Kent and Jonathan Parkes with a cellar full of lurid grooves, funky enough to rattle the fillings in Peter Cushing’s teeth. ‘Chant Ecstatic’ is a gloriously unholy dance around a Satanic hammered dulcimer, ‘Drone Of The Holy Numbers’ a psychedelic wig-out in Denim aftershave. Brilliant fun.

Album available here:
https://libraryoftheoccult.bandcamp.com/album/village-of-the-snake-god

MONOCHROME ECHO
Moonkeeper Reckoning
(Spun Out Of Control)  

This splendid sci-trilogy, helmed by Divine Comedy bassist Simon Little, concludes with alien beasties from Jupiter following hapless human colonists back to Tokyo. But the gentle arpeggios of ‘Fire From The Sky’ suggest a surprisingly chilled aspect to the invasion, and the blissed-out ‘A Call To Arms’ even implies the resistance movement was founded in the Cafe del Mar. Still, things soon get epic: the John Carpenter synths of ‘The Redeemer’ evoke images of a vest-clad Bruce Willis clenching his fist atop a windswept Mount Fuji. And both Willis and Little – of course – emerge victorious.

Album available here:
https://monochromeecho.bandcamp.com/album/moonkeeper-reckoning

PULSE:
Nina Kohout

Who she? 

19-year-old Slovakian singer-songwriter with the voice of an avenging angel, combining dark Eastern European folk music with trip-hop beats. “I was a part of a folklore group for more than ten years,” she says. “We used to sing and dance to hundreds of old Slovak songs filled with stories, some of them rawer than others. I can still feel their distant echoes within me.”

It’s a family tradition, too. Dad Peter is sax player in electro-folk band Autumnist, and Nina has frequently joined them.

“When other kids my age went to the cinema at weekends, I was backstage at festivals,” she says. “So the soundtrack to my childhood was the bands my dad played in. After we played together in Autumnist, my dad started to accompany me in my solo project, and we inhale and exhale the music in absolute harmony.”

Why Nina Kohout?

Just listen to ‘Love Above’, the opening track from her debut EP, Pandemonium. The pianos are hymnal and the strings funereal, but Nina’s voice drags them screaming to the heavens: “With the finger of tenderness / Touching every dimple of the other face”. These are gothic fairytales worthy of the young Kate Bush, and Nina has moved to Blighty to pursue her ambitions.

“At the age of 17, it took all the courage I had to leave my home country and move to London…” she admits. Following in the footsteps of Amy Winehouse and Adele, she’s now studying at the BRIT School in Croydon.

Tell us more…

What does ‘Prebúdzanka’ mean? It’s the title of the EP’s closing track, a blanket of breathtaking multi-tracked harmonies.

“It’s a made-up word I came up with!” she chuckles. “It means the exact opposite of a lullaby, so it’s a song someone would sing to their loved one just after waking up. I believe those few undisturbed seconds between sleep and wakefulness represent the purest state of human existence…”

Pandemonium available here:
https://ninakohout.bandcamp.com/album/pandemonium

Electronic Sound – “the house magazine for plugged in people everywhere” – is published monthly, and available here:
https://electronicsound.co.uk/

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