Best Available Technology—Inscape Routes

Inscape Routes, the new album from Best Available Technology, is a nostalgic and unpredictable collection of ambient dub. The whole album feels oddly lyrical, provoking easier comparison to the quixotic likes of Micachu, or Archy Marshall’s A New Place 2 Drown, than any artists working more firmly within the genre. The fundamentals are obviously there—beefy subs and scratchy, delay-laden percussion. But they’re just the foundation for something altogether stranger. Most of what Inscape Routes has to offer is half-song, half…something else. The album’s plaintive instrumentals speak as forcefully as any lyricist you might think of—but they are also as delicate, tremulous, and spare as the skeletons of dead leaves.

Inscape Routes recycles some well-worn sounds of the 1990s, and some of its synth splashes will leave listeners soaked through with nostalgia. But this album re-contextualises those sounds, deliberately strips them of their vigour and leaves them stilted and struggling. The result is something bittersweet. It’s the last embers of an optimistic fire, one that was lit some decades ago, finally fading into the inky air. Inflatable armchairs rotting on a tumulus of the Packington Landfill. And yeah: it’s become quite trendy to write rave culture eulogies recently—2017 Bicep weepie ‘Glue’ is testament to that. But as you might have guessed, Inscape Routes commits harder to the abstract—and to having ideas of its own—than most deconstructionist club stuff.

About halfway through, Inscape Routes even deconstructs itself. Mid-album track ‘Arc Stoked’ is demolished, to segue into quasi-concrète sketch ‘Observation Hill’. The transition is as wonderful as it is surprising—and is just one of many breathlessly inventive displays of musicianship on the album.

Unconcerned with evoking a specific time or place, Inscape Routes is instead the sound of transience. Like a bullet, it moves through, punctures, and distorts the tissue of its subject. Inscape Routes scrunches some of the last few decades’ musical styles into piles of tangled tape on the floor, and invites you to have a little dance on them. It’s a thoughtful, generous and really fun album.  

Inscape Routes is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Benjamin Finger—Auditory Colors

Benjamin Finger’s Auditory Colors is a synaesthetic treat whose intricate texture rewards attentive listening. Ostensibly an ambient album, Auditory Colors is actually bursting with melody at every level of its rich and varied instrumentation. And whilst publishing as a solo project—composing and recording every track here—Finger has called on a number of collaborators who each enrich the album in their own unique ways.

The first thing you’ll notice is the LP’s imaginative use of loops and field recordings. Abstracted through post-processing and manipulation, these fragments of word salad and sonic texturing become melodic as they repeat and, in some cases, appear to provide the framework of entire songs. They give the album an enormous sense of character and intimacy—a comforting closeness which dodges claustrophobia by miles. The overall feeling they give is warm and nostalgic, with the earnestness and beauty of BBC Radiophonic workshop maestros like Delia Derbyshire and Malcolm Clarke.

More recently comparable could be William Basinski (in particular On Time Out of Time), and Brian Eno and Kevin Shields’ joint EP The Weight of History/Only Once Away My Son. In the case of Auditory Colors’ title track and latecomer ‘See See See’, you can feel a slight Jenny Hval vibe; these tracks both recall some of the ambient pieces from Hval’s Blood Bitch. This is in part due to haunting guest vocals from Inga-Lill Farstad, but also some gothic and ghostly hammering piano and concrète. This is more suggestive than Hval’s work, though, and less melodramatic. The thread which connects all this music—and which is so prominent in Auditory Colors­—is a spectral feeling. It’s the there-and-not-there of heavy summer air filling a room.  

Auditory Colors very regularly has this feeling of thick air. Electronic organ creates a fog which diffuses discrete musical shapes into blobs of colour. ‘Greef Signals’ uses some gentle noise structures to suggest rolling waves or hissing bellows—the cry of air as it is thrown unwillingly around. But melody always cuts through this thickness, intercepting it with joy, clarity and dissolving tension. Melodies are often so short as to resolve immediately, only to then loop right back round again. As a listener, this means you’re transfixed but constantly rewarded; lulled to a sense of calm. Auditory Colors is a rich, compelling and active listen; an audio cleanse that’s impossibly packed with ideas but never treads on its own toes.

Auditory Colors is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Elori Saxl—The Blue of Distance

This debut LP from multidisciplinary artist Elori Saxl elegantly balances the sensory and conceptual. The album is ambient, if you want to pigeonhole it, but often feels too active to be constrained by this label. Rather than standing on the precipice of something, The Blue of Distance creates tension by repeatedly diving in and climbing back out. When not juggling discrete melodic and amelodic sections, it slips into the kind of in-betweeny spaces of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Pink Floyd; any number of tape-looping pioneers.

Saxl does not lean on these established sounds, using them instead as skeleton to support some stunning chamber orchestra arrangements. The oboe of Erin Lensing particularly impresses, repeating hypnotic phrases which transform into the heartbeats of tracks. Found sounds are folded into the mix, too. The most confronting example comes in ‘Wave II’, whose looped beat sounds like a little boat eternally hitting the same jetty. It’s one of many invigorating moments of trance-meets-concrète.

It’s not a surprise to learn Saxl has a background in film. The Blue of Distance is colourfully imagistic, and has some parity with Clint Mansell or Nicholas Britell in its blending of classical/electronic styles. For an album, The Blue of Distance is very visual. It would be impossible, even lacking track titles, not to associate this LP with water, memory, distance. The language Saxl uses is nonverbal, but as precise and intentional as a scalpel. The Blue of Distance uses some more superficial filmic vocabulary too in ‘Blue’, which boasts a desolate and monumental midsection that feels ripped out of a Western score.

The album’s grandness is tempered by a wobbly “information film” vibe. This hip, ultra-analogue hauntology isn’t lip service to a zoomer listening base. It interacts with—and enhances—the album’s themes of memory loss and nostalgia, while ensuring its more grandiose sections never succumb to schmaltz. Saxl is a thoughtful musician whose work achieves transcendence by never trying to force it.

The centrepiece of The Blue of Distance is ‘Memory of Blue’. This 11-minute track is constantly in flux—but it never digresses from or abandons its own fundaments. The track keeps switching things up, and is packed with ideas and experimentations. The tracks juxtaposing styles somehow stay complementary throughout. Its continuous development is impressive, and feels like watching someone play Jenga against themselves, stacking their tower impossibly high. ‘Memory of Blue’ also functions as a vertical slice of the album as a whole. Just as we inspect and distort our own memories, the track is in a beautiful sort of cubist argument with itself, dwelling on a single point from several contradicting perspectives. Its title forms a cheeky—probably unintentional—homage to Vangelis’ Blade Runner track, itself about the falsehood and distortion of memory. Forty years later these concepts still compel and puzzle us. This is a tremendous album whose conceptual richness will keep you coming back for a very long time.

The Blue of Distance is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Benjamin Finger & James Plotkin—We Carry the Curse

Claire Denis’ 2018 film High Life saw humankind colonise space with its darkest and most self-interested impulses. The film juggled tenderness and brutality, hope and nihilism—a curious tone which extended into its minimal score, courtesy of Tindersticks alumnus Stuart A. Staples. There is some shared DNA between Staples’ work and the latest collaborative LP from Benjamin Finger and James Plotkin, We Carry the Curse. Both are stargazing music—but they divide their attention between the stars’ brilliance and what Robert Frost once called the “empty spaces” in between.

Black is a yielding, vacuous colour. Many fear the dark because this vacuity accommodates pre-existing fears—if you are terrified of spiders, your imagination may infest a dark space with them. Our minds wander freely before sleep, because in the unobserved darkness of night we need fear no judgement. Music can be the same way—and with We Carry the Curse, vacuity and darkness allow a depth of contemplation that more active forms may not. The album relishes in stillness, cavernousness, and dark mystification. One listener may find the album deeply strange or disconcerting—another may just as easily find hope, clarity and relaxation.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see a huge wave of younger listeners soon turn towards gestural music like We Carry the Curse. A generation seeking self-actualisation may find comfort in art which doesn’t tell you the right or wrong way to think. Not only can you luxuriate in its formal beauty, you are afforded space to undergo your own spiritual/emotional/intellectual journey—rather than be dictated to by more traditional songwriting, often as confused in its affiliations as it is vocal.

There is more than a passing resemblance between We Carry the Curse and A Silver Mt. Zion’s 2000 album He Has Left Us Alone…. Finger and Plotkin’s title track, in particular, evokes the spirit of Efrim & co. with its wounded strings, funereal plod and crunchy guitar drones. We Carry the Curse gets similar mileage from its tension as A Silver Mt. Zion’s work; restless, refusing to boil over but refusing to slow its simmer. Both artists allow the analogue and electric to collide in an uncomfortable clash—generating a spectral bridging effect between the past and the present. It is as though the bows and strings of dead players are calling from the grave. Albeit terrestrial this time, rather than in the far-flung reaches of space, ghosts represent the same vacuum—unseen, and of indeterminable morality. The title We Carry the Curse is really a question in disguise. Into what empty spaces are we carrying it?

We Carry the Curse is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Bardo Todol—Music 4 Strings...

The two sides of Bardo Todol’s Music 4… are distinguished by the instrument which leads them. The basis of side A is a hypnotic and slowly-ululating synth drone (think Éliane Radigue’s ‘Kyema’). Side B is string-dominated, and consequently has a more fragile—but ominous—tone; as though its straining instruments are wound tight enough to implode on themselves. Bardo Todol unify both sides with their use of field recordings, employing a near-constant hiss of running water as the skeleton for their compositions.

Often the boundary between composed and natural elements is fuzzy and dissolute. The result is an enmeshing of landscapes; a collision of natural and unnatural sounds that feels like wandering into the Strugatsky brothers’ Zone. Sounds could as easily be the catcalling of birds as they could alien visitations. Rough-and-ready analogue sources like hurdy-gurdy, violin and flute are transformed beyond recognition through their own interplay, and some supplemental tape effects. It’s a hyper-real album—as tactile as it is preternatural.   

If constricted to a genre, Music 4… is best described as new-age, carrying the torch of composers like Tomita and David Toop. As such, its use of running water feels indebted to decades of tradition. Artists in this field have used water as Taoist shorthand for yonks; it emblemises growth, acceptance, and change, seeking that which is low, and moving with ease rather than force. Bardo Todol use it to create a curious juxtaposition. Instrumental drones hold you in stillness, but the flurrying soundscapes around them emphasise the passage of time.

Occasionally, Bardo Todol break their own spell. Late on side A, the sound of water disappears for a Boards of Canada-style looping melody. It’s a queasily effective moment; almost feeling like a violation or an ad-break. It’s like a spear of clarity has punctured the trance. Side B has a finger-picked, jazzy section which surfaces for scant minutes before being subsumed by the fog again. These moments are the most explicit example of what makes the album so captivating. When you glance at a forest, it looks harmonious and still—but all the while, plants and animals violently contest territory and fight for mates. Similarly, Music 4… is more compelling for its disharmony than anything else, as a multitude of unique voices jostle for supremacy. This album, like the landscape it explores, bubbles with violence, but is all the more beautiful for it.

Music 4 Strings, Sintetizador, Agua, Una Flauta y Electrónika - Vol. 1 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe