The Incidental Crack is a distance collaboration between Justin Watson (Front & Follow, Gated Canal Community), Rob Spencer (also Gated Canal Community) and Simon Proffitt (Cahn Ingold Prelog, The Master Musicians Of Dyffryn Moor). Avoiding the typical pitfalls of social electrics (a phrase coined by Bovine Life back in ye olde dial-up days of 2000), The Incidental Crack’s approach instead is to juxtapose heavily-disguised quotidian sounds with questioning electronics. 

A case in point is ‘The Second Cup Of Tea Of The Day’, the first of the three lengthy tracks on Municipal Music, their second album together (or is that apart?). If that sounds like a strange and perhaps mundane name for a track – even in the context of the not-going-out-not-seeing-anyone-staring-at-these-four-walls tedium of lockdown – consider that I’m pretty sure that its source field recording is less a field recording and more a kitchen recording of the steps required to make the aforementioned second cup of the tea of the day. Those sounds are then harshly processed and skewed to create ominous textures and brooding drones that, were the British Tea Manufacturers Union (possibly made up) to hear this, they might well think that The Incidental Crack are in cahoots with the British Coffee Manufacturers Union (see above) to scare people off drinking tea. Fortunately, while the track brews its way through what I think is running water, a kettle reaching a climactic boiling point and a teaspoon clattering inside a tea cup, it makes a sharp evolution toward searching, entrancing electronics, ending up in a serene territory set to what feels like a twitchy waltz pulse. 

Two of the three tracks here follow a similar technique of processing field recordings into obscurity and then layering in outlines of rhythm, sinewy synth sequences, siren-like drones and effects. The result is strangely discomfiting, while the familiarity – howsoever processed – is also weirdly soothing. Take the album’s final piece, ‘Ice-Cream At The Pavilion’. On first inspection, the captured material here – the typical beach-side sounds of waves, a carousel, children playing, fun being had, the sound of skin reddening to a crisp under British sun – should be pleasing to the ear; these are the sounds of childhood, of carefree living, of life before mortgages, anxiety, zoonotic illnesses, social fucking media, existential dread and lockdown. In the six hands of The Incidental Crack, those sounds are twisted, inverted, made nightmarish and sinister, reminding me instead of all the stuff I hated about days spent on the beach in Essex and Kent as a kid – getting dressed beneath a towel, sand, other people, being rubbish at skimming stones into the water – and leaving me precariously unsettled. 

Fortunately, the second track – ‘Just Passing Through’ – is somewhat more positive. This is a track relying on volume and fluctuating restlessness to imply a sense of forward motion. Long tones build and fade; drones rise up, get phased and panned across the stereo field; harsh, rapidly-shifting sounds grab your attention and then dissipate; you feel yourself being either pushed or pulled along through some sort of winding, turbulent tunnel toward an unknowable destination (though, according to the sequencing of the tracks, that destination is our nausea-inducing warped beach scene; shudders). Occasionally a tiny little broken melody – a xylophone maybe – reveals itself, adopts a casual exotica breeziness and then just as quickly disappears. It’s a trip full of unbridled energy, like listening to electricity co-operating under duress; that it does this without ever relying on anything so pedestrian as a rhythm to create its suggestion of speed and rapid flight is a testament to this trio’s gleeful sonic adventuring. 

Municipal Music by The Incidental Crack is released May 21 2021 by Herhalen. 

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2021 Further.