Kepier Widow is the alias of North Manchester’s Alexander Roberts. With releases over the last couple of years on labels like Rusted Tone and Panurus, Perspectives And Boundaries is perhaps his most ambitious project to date, consisting of four 30-minute pieces of audio art across two cassettes released by Chelmsford’s Misophonia imprint.

What’s immediately apparent from the opening moments of the Perspectives cassette is that this is a beautiful sprawl of a project, and by the conclusion of the final passages of Boundaries it’s clear that Roberts possesses a potentially limitless capacity for sonic adventuring. Ideas are spliced in, developed quickly and already in the past by the time you’ve got your head around them, whether moments of found sound or intricately detailed electronic music fragments or surreptitious recordings of overheard conversation placed jarringly out of context. Elsewhere, you pick up backward sounds and heavily-disguised vocals that, were it the Sixties or even a NON LP, would have had people claiming to be able to hear satanic orders and coded messages. And who knows? Maybe that’s what they are.

As I made my way though Roberts’ two-hour opus perhaps the most unexpected result was how I found myself thinking about my childhood. There’s a looped laugh at the start of the second part of Perspectives that took me back to a scratched LP of children’s songs wherein ‘The Laughing Policeman’ would cackle menacingly until you ran screaming from the room. Elsewhere, one of the muted electronic passages took on an atmospheric Eighties soundtrack vibe, immediately transporting me back to my pre-teen years glued to episodes of Airwolf.

Perspectives And Boundaries by Kepier Widow is out now on Misophonia.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.