Reviews originally published in Issue 99 of Electronic Sound magazine, March 2023:

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Programme Music: More Themes From The Josef Weinberger Archive 1965-80
(Buried Treasure)

Want to imagine yourself in a wide-lapelled beige suit and leather gloves, recklessly steering a Ford Granada around the abandoned warehouses of 1970s Docklands in pursuit of a shifty-looking Ian McShane? Easy, just lose yourself in the grime-fuelled wah-wah guitars of ‘Mantis’ by Projection. Or are you more at home slipping into a floral kimono and relaxing with a hookah pipe while a young Joanna Lumley languidly fingers the olive in her Martini? You need the sultry brass of ‘Stoned’ by Piet Van Meren.

Between 1973 and 1980, the Josef Weinberger Archive created 26 original albums of impossibly groovy library music, while also repackaging a plethora of recordings from the company’s earlier imprints. Buried Treasure big cheese Alan Gubby, cracking his knuckles in his own secret Docklands HQ, has selected 14 killer tracks for this wonderfully arch compilation, the follow-up to 2021’s Undercurrents. And there really is something here for every mood. Assuming, of course, that all your moods are essentially action sequences from low-budget British crime flicks, liberally peppered with gratuitous sex scenes in damp-ridden boarding houses. Certainly it’s hard to hear the sleazy Moog of Chunky Junket’s ‘Immortal Doodle’ without imagining a clinging nylon shirt being removed to reveal a Double Diamond beer belly and proudly hirsute shoulders.

These are relics from an age when grey-flecked British session men, all Woodbines and PG Tips, created exotic altar egos. Thus Piet Van Meren was, in fact, Essex jazzman Pete Moore, composer of the totemic ‘Pearl And Dean’ cinema jingle. But it’s in the music, too. Hammond organ veteran Derek Austin is behind a brace of wistfully funky numbers – ‘Reflections In The Rain’ and ‘Dissolve In Sepia’ – that wouldn’t disgrace the grittiest of New York blaxploitation soundtracks.  

And the centrepoint? Syd Dale’s life-affirming ‘Marching There And Back Again’, used for eons as the theme to BBC1’s children’s film quiz ‘Screen Test’. Warning: those who remember Chewitts and the Three-Day Week may find themselves overwhelmed by memories of iron-haired presenter Michael Rodd asking posh kids from Guildford what make of car was being driven by the villain in the leather gloves. And that, as we used to say in smoke-filled provincial cinemas every weekend, is where we came in. Wonderful.

Album available here:
https://buriedtreasure.bandcamp.com/album/programme-music

DOUG McKECHNIE
San Francisco Moog: 1968​-​72 Vol. 2
(VG+ Records)

“Back in the 1970s, a psychic told me I was here on vacation,” Doug McKechnie told this very magazine back in 2020. “So whenever things have gotten a little weird, I’ve said to myself, ‘Wait, everything’s OK… I’m just here on vacation’.”

As lifelong holidays go, it’s been pretty eventful. In 1968, still buzzing from his inaugural LSD trip, McKechnie spent six months “with a smile on my face” in the US Army. On his return, his roommate Bruce Hatch bought one of the first Moog Modular Series III synths off the production line (serial number: 004), and the duo turned their third floor apartment into the “San Francisco Radical Laboratories”. For the next four years, it became their mission to bring the groovy sounds of this exciting new technology to academic institutions, hippy festivals (including a set at the ill-fated Altamont) and Grateful Dead recording sessions alike. McKechnie performed, Hatch recorded everything on four-track tape. Recordings that remained largely unheard until Baltimore’s VG+ Records unearthed the sessions in 2020, and this second volume is every bit as downright grin-inducing as the first.

Even in 2023, it feels like the tentative exploration of an alien planet. Opener ‘Search For An Honest Man’ is our acid-fuelled spaceship touching down, its landing hatch opening to reveal a pulsing, throbbing landscape of bleeps and swirls. ‘Glide’ is an 11-minute ramble through crystalline valleys, where mesmeric bloops coalesce into a dizzying, head-spinning storm. And then we’re truly through the looking glass, with ‘Gyre And Gimble’ surely the comedic, melodic bumble of some friendly alien Jabberwock, gambolling across the sands.

But for pure verisimilitude, try ‘Live At The Family Dog’. Is that the sound of genuine, excited audience chatter, captured at this legendary Denver concert hall? It is, and the assembled hairy heads of Colorado gleefully clap along as McKechnie launches into irresistible beats. Then, from nowhere, he subsumes the entire venue in a terrifying throb that surely threatens to dislodge the tiles from that historic ceiling. There is stunned silence, nervous babble, then a heartwarming swell of applause and whoops: it’s a tiny, beautiful slice of synth history. Now a contented octogenarian, McKechnie is still enjoying his blissful, Earth-bound vacation, and here’s hoping these fascinating postcards from his past keep arriving.

Album available here:
https://dougmckechnie.bandcamp.com/album/the-complete-san-francisco-moog-1968-72

FINGERPOP
What’s More Pretentious Than A Sunset
(Kitchen Sink)

The hypothesis: If you put Victorian English Gentlemens Club bassist Louise Mason and State 51 Conspiracy bigwig William Reid into the mothballed science laboratory of an abandoned schoolhouse, they’ll create an album of gloriously trippy industrial dance-pop. The experiment: conducting a series of late-night jams with synths, cellos, guitars and “random looped sounds”, the duo attempted to bond trip-hop rhythms with Brutalist electronica, head-fuck chants and some really quite disconcerting squeaky noises.

The conclusion? Yeah, it’s great. The quirk quotient is high, but there’s an undercurrent of sometimes arresting openness. Mason and Reid set out their stall on breakneck opener ‘Stop’: “Stop feeling clever about feelings, feeling sad”. And even when the beats get hallucinogenically dark – like on standout track ‘The Shapes’ – there’s tenderness. “You are a collage of impeccable sight / And everything starts to shake when I see your impenetrable face,” whispers Reid. An album with a sense of playfulness matched only by its disarming intimacy.

Album available here:
http://recordsrecordsrecords.com/buy/whats-more-pretentious-than-a-su-0/

BHAJAN BHOY
To Love Is To Love Vol 1
To Love Is To Love Vol 2
(Cardinal Fuzz)

When does Ajay Saggar actually sleep? Prolific as the driving force behind King Champion Sounds, Deutsche Ashram, The Common Cold and University Challenged, he’s capable of knocking off an album of immaculate, jazz-infused psychedelia before most of us have finished cleaning our teeth. Help yourself to a second round of toast, too… this latest salvo is a brace of simultaneous releases, completing a triptych begun with 2022 opus Shanti Shanti Shanti.

Barricaded into his own “Soundation Studio” on an Amsterdam industrial estate, Saggar has drifted into a blissfully hypnotic state. Both albums draw on his Indian heritage, with ‘Raga Shanti’ the highlight of Vol 1, fusing raga drones with mesmeric psych grooves. And dream-like closer ‘Lovely Day For Cricket’ leads seamlessly into Vol 2 opener ‘Hari Om Sharan’, a somnambulant vision of tabla and treated sitar. From here, the feel becomes more electronic, with ‘Abshaku… the Ecstatic Truth’ and closer ‘Eliane’s Conch’ drifting on synths that fizzle like a half-remembered nightmare. A subtle and darkly beautiful journey.

Albums available here:
https://bhajanbhoy.bandcamp.com/album/to-love-is-to-love-vols-1-2

GILROY MERE
Gilden Gate
(Clay Pipe)

For a man who thrives on the melancholy of the no-longer-there, it was psychogeographical catnip. A medieval cityport lost to coastal erosion, its church bells still clanging beneath an opaque slab of windswept North Sea? Weekending in the tiny Suffolk hamlet of Dunwich, Oliver Cherer was stunned to discover the unlikely history hidden below the waves. As the enigmatic Gilroy Mere, Cherer’s previous albums have rumbled to the echoes of decommissioned bus routes and railway lines. But Gilden Gate has older bones. Ancient, long-buried in silt.  

Side 1, subtitled ‘Rising’, is a paean to modern Dunwich. ‘Sea Breeze’ teeters on the clifftop, with Cherer an alluring siren: “Breathing, I hear voices now…” Soon, we’re paddling through tides of woodwind and summer’s day synths. But Side 2, ‘Falling’, lures us to the Middle Ages. Riddled with Naomi Burrell’s mournful violin, it’s an elegy to dark, submerged spires, concluding with the spoken ‘St Leonard’. “Lost is thy splendour, sunk in endless night…” Maybe, but the dark beauty of Cherer’s haunting tribute rises above the surface.

Album available here:
https://claypipemusic.greedbag.com/buy/bicycle-ballet/

EVAN LINDORFF-ELLERY
Church Recordings From Monhegan
(Full Spectrum)

On rocky Monhegan Island, ten miles off the coast of Maine, stands a tiny community church. And inside? Sound artist Evan Lindorff-Ellery, recording ambient echoes and his own modest dabblings on upright piano and acoustic guitar. And that’s literally it: two half-hour field recordings from a long night in this weatherbeaten refuge. ‘Evening’ has wistful ivory-tinkling combined with clumping footsteps and pattering rain, ‘Morning’ has discombobulating strums and the caws of distant seabirds at dawn. It’s a perfect and oddly touching snapshot of an affectingly ordinary moment in time. 

Album available here:
https://evanlindorffellery.bandcamp.com/album/church-recordings-from-monhegan

EPIC45
Drakelow
(Wayside & Woodland)

In 2005, Ben Holton and Rob Glover visited the Drakelow Tunnels, deep beneath the Worcestershire countryside. Overwhelmed by this vast underground network, they crafted this wistful 2006 album, now reissued with bonus tracks. It’s an collection reflecting the complex’s own chequered past. ‘Tunnel 1’ is the ghostly clank of the wartime “shadow factory” built to construct fighter plane components, while the dark synths of ‘Tunnel 2’ provide waves of Cold War paranoia: Drakelow was repurposed as a VIP nuclear shelter. An evocative homage to a strange and secret slice of British history. 

Album available here:
https://digital.waysideandwoodland.com/album/drakelow-2023-remaster

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

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