Reviews originally published in Issue 100 of Electronic Sound magazine, April 2023:

JOSEPHINE FOSTER
Domestic Sphere
(Fire)

It’s just Josephine Foster. With an electric guitar. Oh, and wailing cats, Tennessee birdsong and the spectral voice of her late, great-grandmother. Foster’s ninth album for Fire still sounds like battered, Depression-era shellac spinning on a wind-up gramophone player in a flyblown desert shack. Surrounded by chirruping crickets, her tremulous voice lures us into the jaded romance of ‘Pendulum’: “Gone is the candle, gone is the fire / Gone is the spring of our desire”. Oh well, there’s always a quiet night in playing Ker-Plunk.

There’s genuine longing here, though. “If I gave you a dollar you’d give me a dime / You’d kiss me in the morning, I’d kiss you all the time,” she sings on ‘Gentlemen & Ladies’, her fractured vocal acrobatics taking on almost theremin-like qualities. And ‘Reminiscence’ is that hair-raising cross-generational duet, Foster harmonising in genuinely haunting fashion with a crackly recording of her great-grandmother Filomena Maltese, born in 1893. The perfect embodiment of an album that feels like a lost, faded missive from an older, stranger America.

Album available here:
https://josephinefostermusic.bandcamp.com/album/domestic-sphere

THE NIGHT MONITOR
Close Encounters Of The Pennine Kind
(Fonolith)

It’s hard not to imagine Blackpool’s Neil Scrivin sitting with a Mini-Moog on his knee, watching crackly VHS recordings of Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World on a never-ending loop. Previous albums have taken inspiration from the Enfield poltergeist and the dastardly occultism apparently practiced in Sussex’s Clapham Wood. Now, he turns his attention to a bizarre 1980 UFO encounter recalled by real-life PC Alan Godfrey under hypnosis: an account of his own terrifying alien abduction on a November morning in rural West Yorkshire.

Scrivin is clearly in thrall to the 1980s Radiophonic Workshop scores of Messrs Kingsland, Limb and Howell, and the results are splendid. Opener ‘Window Areas’ is a swirl of ominous synths, ‘Yosef’ a moody, squelchy tribute to the Biblical alien who apparently transported Godfrey onboard a hovering spacecraft. And ‘Robots’ is a crunchy homage to the UFO’s eight mechanical crew members, keeping the ship aloft above the outskirts of Todmodern. Set the controls for the heart of Stoodley Pike, it’s all spendidly spooky fayre.

Album available here:
https://thenightmonitor.bandcamp.com/album/close-encounters-of-the-pennine-kind

SURVEY CHANNEL
Canvas Doubles
(Werra Foxma)

“Foggy happiness of barely-remembered days long gone. Hazy summers. Gazing up at blue skies, wondering what it’s like to fly…”

Matt Donatelli is from Buffalo, NY. And blimey, he’s a man of his word. Opener ‘Usselo’ throbs like an afternoon daydream, ‘Debris Analogs’ adds Boards of Canada beats and tinkling, half-asleep synths. Then ‘Magic Weather’ fizzles in the late sunshine as great, white whales of clouds lollop across an ambient sky… Donatelli, it seems, has finally soared to the heavens. An album with wistful joy in its heart, and a pale straw of wheat dangling idly from its mouth.

Album available here:
https://surveychannel.bandcamp.com/album/canvas-doubles

CHIK WHITE
Wind Wound
(Full Spectrum)

Nova Scotia’s Darcy Spidle and his ten-foot horn, everyone. Lecturing at a local college, Spidle was presented with this home-made brass instrument by student Austin Denman. Throughout 2021, he recorded his bold attempts to master this outsized contraption, with the results compiled into this striking collage. There are two lengthy suites: ‘Part One’ starts gently and swells to an overwhelming symphony of looped parps, ‘Part Two’ is darker, with alarming yodelling buried deep within the mix. And apparently the horn is now broken, so this hypnotic artefact is all that remains of its legacy.

Album available here:
https://fullspectrumrecords.bandcamp.com/album/wind-wound

MOMBI YULEMAN
The Curse Of Spring-Heeled Jack
(Bandcamp)

“In the 1800s, there were sightings of a devil who was able to leap from rooftop to rooftop… this phantom was reported all over the United Kingdom”. The stories clearly made it to North Carolina too, where beastie-obsessed Yuleman has crafted this splendid album of gothic synth anthems. Jan Hammer Horror, anyone? ‘Hammersmith 1837’ is melodically bombastic, ‘Paranormal Mechanisms’ boasts spooky arpeggios peeping through a pea-souper of wafting mellotrons. But things get darker: rumours of Jack later spread to Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, and ‘Prague 1945’ boasts a genuinely chilling edge.

Album available here:
https://mombiyuleman.bandcamp.com/album/the-curse-of-spring-heeled-jack-soundtrack

JONATHAN SHARP
Niavka
(Spun Out Of Control)

Sharp’s recordings as The Heartwood Institute are imbued with the gentle, bucolic stillness of his native Cumbria. Niavka, however, is an icy departure, rooted in the brutalist synths of a future Eastern bloc apocalypse. Inspired by his own 2000AD-style short story, he sets out his stall with opener ‘Drone Down’… and it’s a stall proudly stocked with the melodies of peak-era Kraftwerk. But there’s also dark, sci-fi ambience in ‘The Shadow Taken Form’, and ‘Infection Alarm’ draws on Sharp’s own distant past as a producer of head-thumping industrial electronica. Gloomily beautiful.

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

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

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