Bicep – ‘Apricots’ from Isles

A few days ago I suggested that if there is any kind of recurring theme in this 2021 advent series then it may be something to do with tastes changing and horizons expanding. This may be true, or it may be simply that I have more time to invest in following threads which have been left untouched on the cutting room floor for too many years. The discovery of the tremendous Bicep falls into such a category, for there was certainly a point in my past when the thought of missing out on a new release on the Ninja Tune label was almost unthinkable. All those DJ Food records. The Herbaliser. Clusterfunk. Amon Tubin. Roots Manuva. Coldcut, of course. Every one a winner.

So the first I heard of Bicep was ‘Glue’, from 2017’s eponymous debut. Beamed in on a social media post. A lucky click and a jaw-drop. Would it have struck me as forcibly had I hear it four years ago? I like to think it would, for it’s stop-start Burial-esque drum’n’bass is exquisite in its twilit suburban twitchiness. There were days during 2021 when it was all but stuck on repeat here, borrowing deeply into my sub-conscious with its refrains and vocal spectres drifting into my mind riding the road out of Branscombe, sea mist hanging softly on the branches of the Salcombe Thorn. There were weeks too where I carved out images of cassette tapes and hagstones accompanied solely by the sounds of ‘Bicep’ and ‘Isles’, every one of whose one word titled tunes added a grain of undercut here, a glitch of cross-hatch there. Inks mixed to mauve hues of morning.

‘Isles’ is, like that Pye Corner Audio album, a record that sends me back to reveries of those times when Warp’s ‘electronic music for listening’ collections delighted my ears and the sounds of drum’n’bass were everywhere. If those illusory inner-city landscapes faded to memory for me on our drift from the centre to a more rural seclusion then it is poignant perhaps that the sounds of Bicep are as much tinted by natural form as by the harshness of the urban. More so, indeed, as pieces like ‘Lido’, ‘Fir’, ‘Hawk’ and ‘Sundial’ seem to reverberate with a hum and a buzz that is as much that of insects on the meadowsweet as traffic on the Autobahn. ‘Rever’ in particular feels undercut by a kind of sonic hugenkultur that is deeply organic yet technologically wired. A collaboration with cellist and composer Julia Kent, at times it recalls ‘Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares’ if they were beamed in on a Zoom call from the set of ‘Ex Machina’. I’m so glad of the collaboration because otherwise I may have never discovered Kent, occupying as she does the edges of one of those tangential realms of interest. In turn it has led me to discovering her 2021 solo set ‘Stories From The Sea‘ and the gorgeous ‘Branches‘ track made with Library Tapes, whose own piano-driven pieces have in turn soundtracked afternoon drawing meditations and daydreams. Also well worth investigating is ‘The Gyres’, a short collection of pieces that Kent has made for the on-going ‘Outlaw Ocean Music Project‘ with Ian Urbina. Tangents to leap off on. Connections to follow. An ideal for living, or at least a great name for a website. Ha ha.

Back to Bicep though, and the corrupted groove of ‘Apricots’ with it’s clipped vocal as rhythmic instrument: Hypnotic, hallucinatory, the sound of Mandal Hypernautics dipped in Manuka honey. Alliterative blips and beats that feel as though they are thumping the inner ear of an oak. Like sci-fi wrapped in pagan robes, Bicep have thrilled me with ghosts of my past transposed to the present via the altered state of a possible future: Now and then forever.

Pye Corner Audio – ‘Growth Potential’ from Entangled Routes

My review of Pye Corner Audio’s ‘Entangled Routes’ was for Caught By The River and can be found in its original context here: https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2021/11/the-sound-beneath/

Like many I was greatly saddened by the passing of Richard H Kirk earlier this year. Like many too of a certain age, it would be fair to say that the sounds of Cabaret Voltaire helped me into the landscape of challenging electronic music, and if that landscape has remained a somewhat peripheral one throughout my past forty years or so, it would also be true to say that there are delicious periods when it drifts into a position of profound value and influence. Yet Kirk’s passing had me bypassing a return to The Cabs and revisiting instead some of his solo work from around the mid 1990s when Warp were putting out those terrific ‘Artificial Intelligence’ collections. I seem to remember there were some turned up noses (and tuned away ears) at the time. People making disparaging comments about coffee table techno and electronic music for middle class drawing rooms. The flames were stoked with Warp calling these sounds ‘electronic listening music’ and the dancers put their hands in the air and dribbled something about esoteric chin-stroking. Or, more likely, just dribbled. Of course it is entirely possible that I have misremembered all of this, but you would not have to push me hard to tell you that I would rather listen to ‘Reality Net’ than just about any Cabaret Voltaire number these days.

It strikes me that the Ghost Box label have inhabited similar landscapes of electronic listening music throughout most of the 21st Century, although admittedly one perhaps populated by folks daydreaming more often of ‘The Owl Service’ than Autobahns. It’s certainly a landscape, for me, of push and pull. Inexorably drawn by something in the mediated nostalgia for illusory, imaginary scenes collaged from scraps of reality and lashings of suburban mythology yet at the same time repulsed by that very same set of images projected onto my cortex by social streams constantly reconfiguring the/my past. It wasn’t ever like this, was it? Which is, perhaps, entirely the point. We remember nothing except what this moment has placed in our memories; different now than then, altered again tomorrow. It is a cop-out of course to wallow in the idea that nothing is real, but (for artists certainly) there is surely some solace to be found from inhabiting constructed spaces. We slip, Houdini like, from the chains of the everyday and dissolve into gardens where we feel more secure. A different Kirk beamed to a parallel universe. Spock With A Beard. And so on and so forth.

Science, fiction, fantasy, nostalgia, nature. Take your pick and mix. The Ghost Box label have certainly done so, and perhaps Pye Corner Audio more than anyone over the past decade with a string of recordings that have developed individual personalities whilst being recognisable as members of the same family. To cast back into the past again for a moment, didn’t we used to say that we loved each new Autechre record because it sounded exactly like a new Autechre record? That’s an ideal for loving, isn’t it? Celebrate the sameness as much as the changes.

With ‘Entangled Routes’ we find Pye Corner Audio (or Martin Jenkins, if you prefer) burrowing, metaphorically, into the loam of our landscapes to explore the mycorrhizal networks to be found there. These networks are an intriguing phenomenon in and of themselves, yet perhaps as fascinating is the way in which their relatively recent ‘discovery’ by modern science-infatuated humans echoes more ancient, instinctive and spiritual relationships to visible and hidden landscape and its energies. It is this balancing act between the ancient and the modern, the spiritual and the technological that the music of ‘Entangled Routes’ engages with, as Jenkins plays with the notion of interaction with these subterranean, subliminal networks, imagining a communing of spirit and energy. Tree-hugging taken to new heights, or depths, perhaps.

One hardly needs to embrace the folkloric sci-fi concept of ‘Entangled Routes’ to enjoy the record but keeping at least an eye (even a witheringly cynical one) on its core premise certainly does help the sounds conjure visions. Opener ‘New Roots’ gently probes the darkness before pulsing into earthy light, whilst ‘Synaptic’ taps, blips and bops like freshly exposed nerve endings caught in a cocaine shower. Underworld in the underworld. The trilogy of ‘Paleolith’, ‘Earthwork’ and ‘The Creeper’ meanwhile encourage drifts further down into ancient depths, listening into tales of Cthulu filtered through a faulty radiogram beneath layers of mulch. ‘Hive Mind’ and ‘Growth Potential’ witness the power pulsing back into the earth, with the presence of ages getting its groove back on, punctuated briefly by the pitter patter of sunbeams piercing the somnolent gloom of ‘The Clearing’.

‘The Long Now’ is Elliot Gould in subterranean twilight, swimming in an Altman interpretation of a John Dee vision, whilst ‘Phantom Orchid’ is the EVP of ancestral mycelium. Finally, ‘Leaf Mould’, ‘Buried Network’ and album closer ‘Symbiosis’ feel like another triptych. One of those delicate little pieces of 15th Century Dutch religious painting, perhaps. Joos van Cleeve glimpsed through the kaleidoscope of pagan hallucinations. There is rhythm and piety; distance and seduction; mistrust and faith; industriousness and solitude.

Ultimately then ‘Entangled Routes’ sounds like the new Pye Corner Audio record. Perhaps a shade more so or perhaps a shade less, but none the worse for that, and proof that Martin Jenkins and his Ghost Box home are less about the past and more about parallel presents and possible futures. Burrow deep and embrace the pleasure.

Dot Allison – ‘Can You Hear Nature Sing?’ from Heart-Shaped Scars
Blackwater – ‘Siem Reap’ from Navigation

If there is any kind of recurring theme in this 2021 advent series it may be something to do with doubling up. Two for the price of one. Two at a time, baby. All that malarky. Is this because 2021 gave us so many great records that we need an excuse to fit more into the 24 days than might be possible if we stuck to one per day? Perhaps. Perhaps too there is something of tastes changing and horizons expanding, which in turn means more ground to cover. Something like that. Not that Dot Allison is anything new of course, nor that her ‘Heart Shaped Scars’ set is significantly different to any of her previous records (solo and with One Dove), all of which have brought great delight. That said, there is something a little more otherworldly and ethereal in ‘Heart Shaped Scars’ than in previous records, none of which were exactly overtly challenged by gravity’s pull.

But let me rapidly back-pedal on that one because I have this fear that describing something as ‘ethereal’ might send all the wrong signals and may conjure something flimsy and whimsical, like a an erased Slowdive record. Actually, an erased Slowdive record is probably the best Slowdive record, but you get the (barely visible) picture. Easy targets and all that. ‘Heart-Shaped Scars’ is certainly not flimsy and whimsical, although it IS sometimes so beautifully sparse it threatens to fade into non-existence, hovering on the threshold to infinity, so temptingly alluring in its minimalism.

Now if there has always been something of a hint of, say, (and to pick the obvious reference points) Vashti Bunyan and Anne Briggs in Allison’s voice then it is certainly given stronger resonance here, as the songs create spectral bridges between earth and the heavenly constellations (and no surprise to see a track called ‘Constellations’ that is heavenly indeed). Allison deftly flicks her breathy tendrils back and forth, drawing strength and inspiration both from nature and the space that exists beyond and between ourselves and the worlds we physically perceive. ‘Heart-Shaped Scars’ is a record that echoes with loss and its eternal echoes, both personal and universal, and as such resonates remarkably strongly in these times. It is not a record, however, enslaved to the Now, and if there are suggestions that contemporary concerns might be at issue here, it is only that: a suggestion. ‘Heart-Shaped Scars’ treads the line between worlds with a finesse that is an endless pleasure to behold, never more so than on the lovely ‘Can You Hear Nature Sing?’. A duet with Zoë Bestel, whose 2018 ‘Transcience’ LP for Last Night From Glasgow is certainly worth tracking down, it inhabits a landscape not unlike that of This Is The Kit. A delicate rumination, nestling in the buttercup fields by Crawick Water, it breathes on our lips and promises we shall never have the Earth.

If Dot Allison was not new to me in 2021 then the sounds of Blackwater certainly were, with their ‘Navigation’ set seeping indelibly into my consciousness after some surreptitious nods from valued sources (step forward Brogues and the Monorail crew). Now I do not pretend to know (or indeed to care) anything about any ‘scenes’ to which Blackwater may or may not align themselves/be aligned to by others but it strikes me that ‘Navigation’ is a record that clicks its synaptic connections to the worlds of dub and transient electronic improv (is that A Thing? I feel sure it must be). Perhaps it rubs shoulders with the almost non-existence of GAS, or Basic Channel slipping through a portal into the Ghost Box. It may even be ambient-Prog, if such a thing were to exist (and I’m sure it does). Tangentially, which is always the best way, ‘Navigation’ too reminds me of the first time I heard Bark Psychosis. Something simultaneously recognisable yet obfuscated, as though someone were drawing the veil over consciousness and teasing me into hallucinatory subterranean delirium.

The delirium in Blackwater is mostly instrumental, with the space between as essential as the daubs and washes of sound. The music breathes a meditative conjuration of the hour before sunrise, where we slip backwards and forwards between night and day, the edge of darkness and the palest of lights. The landscape is that of liminal waterways and could be accompaniment to the photographs of Thomas Joshua Copper or Paul Kenny, occupying a similar space between abstract and figurative. So mostly instrumental, but not exclusively so, for voice defines an element in ‘Navigation’ that helps give root and solidifies form. One voice, as on the seven minute void of ‘L Line’ is vaporous, barely there; an echo of Roy Montgomery intoning incantations in some urban pagan ritual in the tomb of forgotten subterranean waterways. Glistening moisture drapes the walls and drips into stagnant pools. The distant rumble of tube train as a sub-bass caress.

In another of the voices there is something of Laila Sakini (whose ‘Princess Diana Of Wales’ LP is another one of those end-of-year-just-too-late-for-inclusion artefacts) and Carla Dal Forno’s mesmeric and whispery delivery, particularly on the tremendous ‘Siem Riep’. With a burbling brook pattering in the background throughout the track, its minimalist gentility is like a sedative administered by Young Marble Giants to a fledgling snow owl huddled in a silk cocoon beneath a hunter’s moon. Hypnotic, addictive and hauntingly beautiful.

Adam Geoffrey Cole – ‘Sunrise’ from Fallowing
Alula Down – ‘Caravan’ from Postcards from Godley Moor, Spring 2021

Adam Geoffrey Cole has been something of a fixture in the Unpopular firmament these past few years through his recordings as Trappist Afterland, each of which has provided an ecstasy of spiralling drone-entranced magic. 2021’s ‘Fallowing’ album however sees Cole detach the Trappist moniker and journey into slightly more traditional folk territory, where ‘traditional’ denotes the darker, earthier, more subterranean landscapes of ancient lore rather than something viewed through the possibly decalcifying lens of, say, a Cecil Sharp revivalism. In Coles’ folk music all the ungainly knots, burrs, welts and wounds stay in place. This is folk as hallucinatory spiritual confessional; folk as much a fervent rumble in the acid loam as a frolic in the sunlit copse. As on the Trappist Afterland records, Cole uses many of his songs to explore the complexities and eternities of religion, nature and spirituality in a 21st Century environment: Not so much a bitter question mark on the realities of daily existence as a beatific acknowledgement of impermanence. ‘Fallowing’ is a record that brings a shimmer of light to the gloom of winter and a shiver of chill to the harsh brightness of summer; is a record that spans hemispheres to bring balance to the soul. Breathe deeply and savour its pleasures.

I have Adam Geoffrey Cole to thank for my introduction to Alula Down, for it was at a Trappist Afterland show in 2019 that I first came across their beguiling improvisory ambient folk. The ‘Homedowns’ set of 2017/18 was a delight, although perhaps a little pretty and lacking in the strange, natural evocations of otherness displayed in live performance. Their ‘Postcards from Godley Moor’ recordings of the past two years, on the other hand, have very much risen to that challenge as they each tease out responses to the four seasons in spookily spectral yet deeply rooted form. Two of these collections appeared in 2021: ‘Winter’ in February and ‘Spring’ in June. As one might suspect given the release dates, each of these ‘Postcards’ sets are reflections on the season; echoes as much as contemporary evocations. Field recordings (“clock ticking, dog snoring”, “evening walk with fencepost banger”) blend with instruments traditional and homespun (nylon strung guitar, harmonium, Danelectro dc59) each conjuring atmosphere redolent of the season’s spirit. Icy chills and gently unfurling warmth permeate shorter traditional folk tunes and extended improvisations alike, Kate Gathercole’s exquisite vocal a unifying factor beamed in from the depths of the earth and the starlit heights of the heavens. Accompanied by a series of physical, printed art cards featuring notes, lyrics, drawings and ruminations, ‘Postcards from Godley Edge’ is both inevitably touched and informed by COVID lockdown isolationism and splendidly isolated in its own spectral space: Recordings that are simultaneously rooted in specifics yet beautifully and naturally out of time.