(First published in Issue 120 of Electronic Sound magazine, December 2024)

CARLISLE CITY COUNCIL
The Lanes Redevelopment

DAVID A JAYCOCK
Music For Space Age Shopping

XQUI & DOGS VERSUS SHADOWS
Dwell Time
(Subexotic)

All over the country, they are falling like ninepins. Demolition balls swing, concrete edifices tumble. So far, they go unmourned – there are no preservation orders, no protest groups. So just who will commemorate the legacy of the humble 20th century shopping arcade? Thankfully, even as the rubble falls, here come Subexotic Records with an affecting three-album tribute to the golden age of British retail.

Tempting as it is to imagine the actual Carlisle City Council creating an austere synth homage to the city’s flagship shopping hub (“Motion carried, Miss Wilberforce – we’ll need a Yamaha DX7 delivered to the civic centre by Tuesday”), The Lanes Redevelopment is actually the work of native Cumbrian Jonathan Sharp. In his guise as The Heartwood Institute, Sharp has frequently celebrated the rustic weirdness of the British countryside, but here he catches the 685 bus to the gigantic Lanes Shopping Centre to honour with equal aplomb the urban weirdness of Primark and Superdrug.

The building itself was unveiled in 1984, and Sharp’s album gently spoofs the electronic library music of the era. ‘At The Border City’ boasts the kind of cod-Japanese Koto sounds that were once the sole preserve of travel documentaries hosted by Clive James. ‘Crown And Anchor Lane’ has deliciously oozy synths of the type enthusiastically employed whenever Tomorrow’s World despatched Maggie Philbin to do something exciting with a floppy disk.

As with so many mid-20th century developments, the building of The Lanes required the sweeping away of generations’ worth of social history. ‘Demolishing The Old Lanes’ marks the merciless destruction of these tumbledown terraces, adeptly combining the busy melodies of this vanished community with the thrusting rhythms of encroaching modernity. By the time we reach the stark, electronic shards of ‘Your Council Working For You’, the tone has turned decidedly sinister. Sharp, it seems, has mixed feelings about the Orwellian coldness of the future he was promised as a child.

Such reservations are clearly echoed on Music For Space Age Shopping. David A Jaycock has compared the construction of concrete shopping arcades on the remains of beloved backstreets to the building of Christian churches on ancient Pagan sites, and his album allows hints of these urban “old ways” to bleed through. We begin with a wistful three-piece homage to Manchester’s Arndale Centre, where contemporary ambience gives way to vintage bleeps before New Age drones take over. ‘Minut Men Totems’, meanwhile, is a beautiful Mellotron homage to the three pseudo-Native American sculptures erected by William Mitchell outside the University of Salford in 1966.

The windswept swoops of ‘St Peter’s Precinct (Part One)’ then explore a confusing dilemma. If we mourn the bulldozing of our ancient marketplaces for the construction of these modernist utopias, should we not also mourn the now widespread loss of the replacement retail centres themselves? St Peter’s Precinct opened in Oldham in 1967, but lasted a mere 23 years before its 1990 demolition was – apparently – cheered by the gathered crowds. Nevertheless, the building was already infused with its own social history, its own giddy welter of family memories and significance. Consequently, the optimistic arpeggios of ‘Luminous (Plymouth Market)’ feel like a plea on behalf of every remaining concrete arcade still hopeful of finding fresh purpose in the 2020s.

And if all this feels a little heavy, try Dwell Time instead. A cross-Pennine collaboration between acclaimed Lancashire producer Xqui and seasoned Nottingham hauntologist Lee ‘Dogs Versus Shadows’ Pylon, it’s a glorious jumble of easy listening muzak and experimental sound collage. ‘Super Shiny Floors’ is the prime example: tinkling pianoforte and pseudo Latin rhythms devolve into a looped mix that perfectly evokes the feeling of getting hopelessly lost while looking for Thinsulate gloves in the Preston branch of C&A.

It’s great fun. ‘Bargain Bin Shuffle’ showcases the kind of Bontempi bossa nova rhythms once played by men with combovers to demonstrate “the latest model, madam” in the electrical department of Debenhams. ‘A Fancy Electronic Gadget’ will provide a bleepy rush for anyone who ever typed four-letter filth into a ZX81 in Boots before being told off by a shop assistant with a passing resemblance to Sybil Fawlty. And the elegiac synths of ‘Closing Time, Please Leave’ are genuinely touching, unearthing long-buried memories of Christmas lists composed beneath darkening November skies on the bus back to your grandma’s house.

As the festive season approaches, and a cavalcade of Black Friday online deals begin to overwhelm our inboxes, spare a thought for a bittersweet era of communal retail now passing swiftly into the realms of faded, collective memory. For cream scones with your mum in the British Home Stores cafe. For checking the football results on the tellies in Rumbelows window. And for three albums that all capture these vanishing moments with equal degrees of tenderness and melancholy.

Albums available here:
https://carlislecitycouncil.bandcamp.com/album/the-lanes-re-development
https://davidajaycock.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-space-age-shopping
https://subexoticrecords.bandcamp.com/album/dwell-time

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Undulating Waters 8
(Woodford Halse)
 
It’s six years since Mat Handley launched his Woodford Halse label with the first Undulating Waters compilation, and he’s since become the Sir Alex Ferguson of DIY electronica, gently nurturing promising newcomers to take their place alongside seasoned old pros. This eighth instalment kicks off with slick passing movements from some familiar faces. ‘Jurema’ is a Boards of Canada dreamstate with added harpsichords from Manchester starlet Barry ‘Apta’ Smethurst, while ‘Pacifires’ is a salvo of 1980s beats and brassy melodies from experienced US international Wayne ‘Panamint Manse’ Ulner.

But, as ever, a new generation is breaking through. Among the highlights? Collectively, Welsh midfield duo Paul Brookes and Matthew Beckingham are Maes Y Circles, and they build the spiralling analogue arpeggios of ‘Confi-I’ to a rousing crescendo. Meanwhile, Drew ‘Scholars Of The Peak’ Huddart presses his extensive bell-ringing experience into service with the beguiling chimes of ‘A Lost Past’. It’s the heartwarming climax to an impressive team effort, boding well for the rest of the season.

Album available here:
https://woodfordhalse.bandcamp.com/album/wf-86-undulating-waters-8

DOGS VERSUS SHADOWS AND NICHOLAS LANGLEY
Salt Coast
(Strategic Tape Reserve)

“The empty buildings on an often-walked street, 1970s appliances…” Such are the inspirations that Lee ‘Dogs Versus Shadows’ Pylon and Nicholas Langley claim for this fuzzy, muzzy-headed album. It’s certainly hard to hear the tense bloops of ‘Cat Shadows’ or the damp-soaked piano of ‘Gunghilda’s Submarine’ without picturing the boarded-up ‘Creepy House’ that all your mates knew to avoid. You know, the one with the knee-high lawn. And the cats. And the rusty old fridge just visible through a brown, spider-laden kitchen window.   

Fans of early Aphex Twin will find much to love. The duo have crafted a similarly drowsy homage to their own childhood nightmares, combining vintage radiophonics with genuinely disturbing soundscapes – the guttural moans of ‘Sidled Up To The Heathens’ actually suggest claws are beginning to poke out from the behind that fridge door. Elsewhere, the humming valves of ‘Pebblemill’ and the pre-school boings of ‘Wooden Television Dial’ might have more sensitive listeners checking nervously for chickenpox blisters. A terrific album of sepia-tinted sickness. 

Album available here:
https://strategictapereserve.bandcamp.com/album/salt-coast

SLOMO
Zen And Zennor
(Trilithon)  

Zennor? A tiny Cornish village boasting a storm-lashed megalithic burial chamber where, apparently, Bronze Age bodies were once propped up for passing wildlife to pick clean. Three thousand years later, Chris McGrail and Howard Marsden have combined the lingering psychic echoes of the site’s ancient heritage with an appropriately overcast ambience to create an atmospheric album of longform drones.

Duo and album are both aptly titled. Despite 20 years together, this is only the fifth Slomo long-player, and their unhurried nature is epitomised by the 22-minute title track. It’s a suitably meditative workout that becomes subsumed by atonal darkness, the modular equivalent of circling the Cornish moorland with an upside-down Ordnance Survey map while the rain gradually gets heavier. And although the clouds temporarily clear, ‘Zennor Diode’ fizzles with throbbing electrical energy before the subterranean pulses of ‘Antechamber’ leave us stranded underground with darkness descending. Make sure you climb out for a pint in the Tinners Arms long before the buzzards start circling. 

Album available here:
https://soundsofslomo.bandcamp.com/album/zen-and-zennor

BILLY REEVES
When Lord God Almighty Reads The News
(Last Night From Glasgow) 

Hail to the polymath! Billy Reeves founded theaudience with Sophie Ellis-Bextor, has been a BBC commentator on Brentford FC matches, and his third solo album is a riot of plonky synth-pop delights that never fails to charm. “I’m over the hill / With nothing to say,” he claims on opening track ‘Generation Game’, a bleepy shrug of midlife defiance. But the album is joyously verbose. ‘Let’s Not’ cocks a snook at pretentious arty parties and is a dead ringer for early Blancmange, while ‘Bastards!’ is a Suicide-esque scream of rage at the shabbiness of Broken Britain. Thrillingly narky pop. 

Album streaming here:
https://open.spotify.com/album/6B8bu4nHTUa3an4nkjtmZw

CLEAVER BOI AND THE HUNGRY GHOST
Zener_55
(Sensory Leakage)

The presence of Brigid, triple-formed Celtic goddess of fire, water and prophecy, hangs heavy over this evocative mini-album from an enigmatic London three-piece. The ceremony begins with the looped, wordless harmonies of the appropriately-named ‘Three Brigids’, before the whispered interlude of ‘Yellow Wallpaper’ morphs back into the spectral collage of ‘Three Brigids Part Two’. ‘Havia Un Tempo’ adds tropical birdsong and “meditative Portuguese chants” to complete an entrancing entry into the expanding Sensory Leakage canon.

Album available here:
https://sensoryleakage.bandcamp.com/album/zener-55

Electronic Sound – “the house magazine for plugged in people everywhere” – is published monthly, and available here:
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