Reviews originally published in Issue 101 of Electronic Sound magazine, May 2023:

WARRINGTON RUNCORN NEW-TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN
The Nation’s Most Central Location
(Castles In Space)

1970s town councillors sporting nylon shirts and combovers! Plummy-voiced promotional films promising jetpacks for all Skelmersdale residents by the year 1985! Until now, across three beautifully realised albums, Lancashire’s Gordon Chapman-Fox has used the charmingly retro affectations of the 20th century New Town movement to lend his glacial synth workouts an air of knowing good humour. But, beneath it all, there has been a bubbling undercurrent of resentment. A deepset frustration that these altruistic visions of a gleaming future for working class Northerners were ultimately scuppered by wilful, managed decline and the inexorable rise of Thatcherism. On this, his excellent fourth outing for Castles In Space, the giggles are gone and Chapman-Fox sounds righteously pissed off. 

Could you make a case for 2022’s Districts, Roads, Open Space, with its airy, 13-minute explorations of suburban ennui, being the expansive Warrington-Runcorn prog rock album? If not quite Tales From Topographic Oceans then at least Tales Of Tarporley and Oldham? If so, then The Nation’s Most Central Location is the moment punk arrived in Keckwick. Opener ‘Just Off The M56 (Junction 12)’ is a dark wedge of foreboding ambience, a rumble of incessant synth traffic on the sliproad to Appleton Thorn. ‘Rocksavage’, named in honour of the gas-fired power station belching away beside the same motorway junction, adds slick beats and tinkling melodies but still can’t disguise a feeling of lingering bitterness.

The Northern Powerhouse? Levelling Up? Bullshit. That’s the clear message of ‘London’s Moving Our Way’, an ice-cold slab of foul-tempered pulses, a defiant two fingers to the Westminster lickspittles who, for decades on end, have promised untold riches while delivering little more than pithy soundbites and photo-ops for the local rags. And, speaking of which… ‘A Brighter And More Prosperous Future’ is the perfect sardonic closer, an atonal electronic eye-roll at the kind of vacuous Red Wall pledges that get ripples of applause on Question Time but ultimately do nothing to help those unable to afford gas bills and margarine in 2023. And that is why, in every sense, this is the album in which Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan finally shakes off the shackles of the past. There’s a battle to fought in the present, and Chapman-Fox is with us in the trenches.

Album available here:
https://warrington-runcorn-cis.bandcamp.com/album/the-nations-most-central-location

ANDY BELL AND MASAL
Tidal Love Numbers
(Sonic Cathedral)

Which former Oasis member was always most likely to record an album of astral jazz and psychedelic ambience? Unless there’s something we really don’t know about Tony McCarroll, it was always going to be Andy Bell. When Essex duo Masal supported Bell at a 2022 show, the conversation swiftly turned to collaboration. And how Bell’s banks of chiming guitars could combine with the throbbing synths and plucked harps of, respectively, Al Johnson and Oz Simseck. 

The answer? Beautifully. The Felt-esque track titles may be deliberately unwieldy, but the music itself is affectingly simple. Fifteen-minute opener ‘Murmuration Of Warm Dappled Light On Her Back After Swimming’ sets the tone, with Simseck’s delicate harp effortlessly finding the spaces between gentle guitar noodlings. Fans of Alice Coltrane’s late 1960s albums will find much to love, but there are hints of Bell’s early days as a pedal-fixated shoegazer, too. Notably on ‘The Slight Unease Of Seeing A Crescent Moon In Blue Midday Sky’, where waves of distortion are the gathering stormclouds on a horizon of otherwise perfect stillness. 

Album available here:
https://andybell.bandcamp.com/album/tidal-love-numbers

UNE
Whirl
(Spun Out Of Control)

What comes around goes around? That’s certainly the case on this fourth album from radio behemoth Mark Radcliffe and Hacienda scenester Paul Langley. Previous UNE concept albums have paid homage to foreign language words with no English equivalent and, most recently, the haunting qualities of post-war Balkan Brutalism. Whirl takes inspiration from, quite simply, things that spin around. From the planet Mercury to the legendary Whirling Dervishes of the Sufi religion.

Opening track ‘Molengang’ sets a charming precedent. The Dutch word for collected windmills, it marries the reassuring clank of rotating sails to grin-inducing Kraftwerk synths. “I’m pacified in cruise control / The sails go round to soothe the soul,” sings Radcliffe, his vocals throughout providing comforting stillness on an album with its own sense of perpetual motion. Tracks are segued seamlessly, through the soft music boxes of ‘Dervish’ to the motorik beats of ‘Twisted’, the tale of an apologetic tropical storm. Heartwarming, melodic and oddly moving, it’s an album that’s – ahem – resolutely worth a spin.

Album available here:
https://spunoutofcontrol.bandcamp.com/album/whirl

CATE BROOKS
Tapeworks
(Cafe Kaput)

Never underestimate the power of a good haggle. In 1998, Cate Brooks’ partner struck a hard bargain over a 1960s reel-to-reel tape recorder gathering dust in a Lowestoft junk shop, and this charming gadget has been Brooks’ faithful studio companion ever since. Tapeworks is a soothing homage to the affecting resonance of such vintage technology. With just a hint of melancholy, too… Brooks admits she was keen to make the album quickly, while the clanking wheels of her now 60-year-old recorder were still just about turning. It’s like gently probing the memories of an ailing, elderly relative.

There are six lengthy tracks here, all titled with Roman numerals. Eleven-minute opener ‘I’ sets the tone with tinkling synths and waves of ambience, while Goldfrapp collaborator Hazel Mills adds floating vocal loops to ‘II’ and ‘V’. The mood is similar to Eno’s chilled 1980s opus, Thursday Afternoon. But really, the soft hiss of those ancient Sony tapes is the star, and the degraded fuzz of ancient stock becomes an extra instrument of touching plangency. Music For Gazing Out Of Windows.

Album available here:
https://cafekaput.bandcamp.com/album/tapeworks

SYNTHETIC VILLAINS
Hidden Camera Syndrome
(Flood Of Sound)

“I used to feel like a hidden camera… viewing the world I lived in as a non-participatory observer”. So says Richard J Turner of an adolescence spent in Preston, boldly eschewing Tokyo Jo’s nightclub for the musings of Albert Camus. His fifth album as Synthetic Villains perfectly captures this feeling of neutral detachment. The seven-minute title track builds pulsing, Berlin School synths up to panic-attack levels of breathlessness, and the hypnotic buzzsaw rhythms of ‘Circular Forms’ form perhaps one of the finest-ever musical evocations of brain-freezing anxiety. Heartfelt and affecting.

Album available here:
https://syntheticvillains.bandcamp.com/album/hidden-camera-syndrome

THE ALL GOLDEN
Yestereven
(Woodford Halse)

Apparently contemplating the “end times”, Wearside polymath Pete Gofton has made an elegantly melancholic album. ‘Dogon’ is a Beatley homage to the prophecies of these indigenous Malian stargazers, ‘Yer Wings’ a Pink Floyd-esque exploration of the conspiracy theories (secret bunkers, lizard people, etc) surrounding Denver airport. And ‘The Mandate Of The Kingdom Of Heaven’ is surely the funkiest-ever interpretation of metaphysical political philosophy from imperialist-era China. Building songs on the foundations of his own 1990s demos, Gofton finds hope and beauty amid maelstroms of oddness.

Album available here:
https://woodfordhalse.bandcamp.com/album/wf-81-yestereven

HENGE
Alpha Test 4
(Cosmic Dross)

“With each record we have sought to fine tune our extraterrestrial sounds for human ears…” On their third album, intergalactic proggers Zpor, Goo, Grok and Nom are concerned about the climate crisis. “It will not be long before the ice melts and the gas escapes / The tipping point is coming, humans” gasps Zpor on breakneck single ‘Get A Wiggle On’. But fine tuning? Don’t fret. The beats are a little slicker and tighter, but they still essentially sound like The Cardiacs and Gong fighting over the Pacman machine at a Happy Hardcore club. Cosmic.

Album available here:
https://hengemusic.bandcamp.com/album/alpha-test-4

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

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