Tag: Electronic

Inside Tracks: Amongst The Pigeons – Those Stolen Moments

On By 429harrowroadIn Interviews2 Comments

It’s been seven years since the last Amongst The Pigeons album, and five years since Daniel Parsons decided to call pest control and exterminate the ATP project. After a spell working in the duo Exactly Zero, Daniel found himself idling away the time in a local café and before he knew it he was donning his characteristic pigeon mask all over again, and Those Stolen Moments was the eventual result.

In this exclusive feature for Further., Daniel talks us through the nine new tracks on a record that is distinctively ATP but more acutely focussed on its creator’s own instincts rather than deploying guest vocalists. It is a record of continually-evolving electronic juxtapositions and thought-provoking contemplations on how we spend that most undervalued of commodities – our personal time.

Happy Beginnings

The album opens with ‘Happy Beginnings’.

The track started out as an instrumental but it never felt finished and I spent a long time working out what to do with it. Last year I started going to car boot sales and while looking through some vinyl I found an old record that taught children how to play instruments. The samples in this track come from that and work perfectly for the opening of the album.

The title for this one came from a conversation I had with a friend. He was talking about the concept of a ‘happy ending’ massage and said that in his mind it would be better to start with the ‘happy’ activity and then move onto having a nice relaxing massage.

Inflight Entertainment

The second track is Inflight Entertainment. This track was born on a flight to Poland using my iPhone and GarageBand. During the flight I created a 20-second loop which was sounding quite cool. When I got home I took the loop into my Shedio and fully fleshed out the track. A Shedio is a recording studio in a shed and mine sits at the end of my garden. It’s a magical place where time often stands still.

When I made my debut album and early EPs I used a lot of field recordings and still like to capture sounds while I am out and about. In the background of this track there are samples from the actual flight.

Perching

Back in 2014 I announced that I would stop making music as Amongst The Pigeons.

In the years that followed my friend Ollie and I made music under the name Exactly Zero (exactlyzero.co.uk). We would meet up each week and work on tracks but it was a slow process and in between our weekly meets I was starting to work on some new music on my own.

‘Perching’ was the first ‘new’ Amongst The Pigeons song and it really did come about by accident. One day I was sat in Perch (my local coffee shop) and I had my MacBook with me, I hit record and started capturing the background noise of the café. When I got back to the Shedio I cut up some of the clutter and created a little beat with the crockery and started putting synths over the top.

This track also has both of my kids voices sampled across the song. They enjoy coming out to the Shedio and if I am in the middle of recording I always try and get them to shout and sing into the microphone.

Polly Bee Gone

‘Polly Bee Gone’ is one of the heavier-sounding ATP tracks and became a bit of a nightmare to finish. I actually released an earlier version of this back in March on an ‘introductory’ album. My plan was to draw a line between the old ATP songs and the new ‘ATP 2.0’ music. I kept working on this song after that original release and managed to tidy it up a bit more and get to the stage where I was happy with it.

The song title came from the synth patch I was using which was a ‘PolyB’ sound.

I also made a video for this track which features me wearing one of my ATP Pigeon Masks while walking through Trafalgar Square. There was a very funny moment when a small kid was chasing a load of pigeons and they turned round to see a 6ft Pigeon towering over them disapprovingly.

Beautiful Negative Space

As I mentioned earlier I didn’t really plan to restart ATP, but once I had a few tracks, I started to question what I should do with them. Originally I was going to release a four track EP, then a five track EP and so on. It got to the stage where I had eight tracks and I thought I should stop but then I started work on this song and felt it would sit perfectly in the middle of the album.

It is one of the more mellow tunes on the record and originally I wanted to get guest vocals on it and turn it into a Robyn-esque tune. I don’t sing myself and in the past have been lucky to work with some awesome artists, but the more I thought about it, I wanted this album to be much more of a pure electronica set of songs. The next ATP releases will likely feature more guest singers.

At Any Opportunity

The album is called Those Stolen Moments as I wanted to capture the circumstances around how it was made. I have a full time job and a family so my ‘free’ time is limited and this album was made in those pockets of time that don’t really exist. I usually head out to the Shedio one or two nights a week and tend to work between 9 or 10pm and 2am. It’s a beautiful time of the day / night and I love being awake and creative while many people are asleep.

‘At Any Opportunity’ has a little sample at the start in which I try to sum up my feelings about making the most of time and seizing chances. There are times when it can be hard being a solo musician and you only have yourself to push you along to get music made. There can be times when self-doubt creeps in and you question everything you are doing.

Thinking Is Addictive

This track features part of an Eckhart Tolle speech about how thinking can be addictive and the importance of being able to stop thinking. What he says is very true and it fits so perfectly as an Amongst The Pigeons tune. There are some great synth and bass parts hidden away in this song. I always try to make my music do the unexpected and take people on a whirlwind journey as they listen to the songs. I also made a lyric video for this track which took ages to do.

I have no idea if Tolle would approve of this track but I like to think he’d appreciate it.

The 25th Hour

The title of this song again harks back to another example of making the most of time that doesn’t exist. In my mind the 25th hour is the extra time you create when you really push yourself to do more with your day and get stuff done.

This song was pretty much made in a single night and was born out of being utterly uninspired. I went out to my Shedio and was feeling quite fed up after a long week at work and didn’t really fancy doing anything at all. I started making the track and it all came together incredibly quickly, it was one of those nights where it got to 1am, then 2am and I thought I really should go to bed but couldn’t stop working on it.

For me that is the biggest thrill about making music. When you start, you effectively have nothing, but an empty page, and over a period of time you are creating something that didn’t exist before.

Water Into Whisky

Most of the songs on the album all clock in at under three minutes but on this closing track I allow things to take their time to unfurl.

It is fair to say that one of my favourite bands when I was growing up was Orbital. They have always heavily influenced the sound of Amongst The Pigeons which I think people may hear while listening to this song in particular.

This song started out as a little 10-second loop of random synth riffs. A few years ago my friend Adam (from Monkeyfist) came down to the Shedio with his euphonium to record on one of the Exactly Zero tracks. During the night we polished off a bottle of whisky between us and before we finished for the night we spent half an hour messing around with the synths.

A year or so later I revisited the loop we had made and started to stretch it out and build this song around it. It’s a slow build which leads into a more epic ending for the album and brings everything to a close.

Those Stolen Moments by Amongst The Pigeons is released November 15 2019 by Peace & Feathers.

Interview: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.

Tears|Ov – A Hopeless Place

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When I was a small child my parents bought a copy of a children’s music LP called All Aboard. It had a whiff of a K-Tel compilation about it, containing songs like ‘Right Said Fred’ by Bernard Cribbins, ‘Ernie’ by Benny Hill and ‘Grandad’ by Clive Dunn. Side one of the album opened with a version of ‘The Laughing Policeman’ by Charles Penrose. I suspect because of mishandling on the part of my mischievous toddler fingers, that track was irreparably scratched, right at the point where the jocular copper of the song started laughing. That looped chuckling left an indelible mark on my childhood, running through the fear I felt as I watched the original version of IT, through TV shows with canner laughter and pretty much right up to the point I heard ‘I Stand On The Cable’ and ‘Dancing Without’ by Tears|Ov.

Tears|Ov is a trio of Lori E. Allen (vocals, samples, sequenced percussion, piano, synth, noise), Deborah Wale (vocals, percussion, tube, synth, noise, scratching, spoken word) and Katie Spafford (cello). Although the three performed together as part of Allen’s 2016 album for The Tapeworm, Tears Of The Material Vulture, the catalyst for this LP was a performance commission by artist Wolfgang Tillmans as part of the South Tanks series that ran alongside his 2017 Tate Modern retrospective. These are not the pieces that Allen / Wale / Spafford performed, exactly, as these are tracks formed of a collective after-hours improvisation process wherein each is a discrete moment unto itself. Triggered initially by Allen’s foundation loops, Wale and Spafford are then free to respond as they see fit, creating a feedback loop that allows Allen to alter and answer in return.

The eight pieces here are powerful, driven moments that sound perfectly composed rather than carrying the scratchy, inchoate gestures that one normally associates with freeform music. The tracks mentioned earlier – ‘I Stand On The Cable’ and ‘Dancing Without’ – possess a rich, interwoven tapestry of sonic events, glued together as tight layers (pulsing electronics, clipped instructions reminiscent of ‘Revolution #9’, and that incessant, troubling laughter – which collapses into distress on the latter track). If these found sound layers appear skittish and randomised, Spafford’s cello and Wade’s spoken word, when placed next to Allen’s finely-wrought electronics on moments like ‘Trapdoor Ant’ provide a stentorian focal point to proceedings, even if they are almost immediately sliced through with brief snatches of noisy intervention.

On the whole, this is a dark and brooding album befitting of both its title and the two tracks with the same name that bookend the LP. Surprising, then, to find two tracks that are, at least in part, completely at odds with the prevailing tone of A Hopeless Place. ‘Overstimulated Arcade Rat’ carries a sci-fi edge reminiscent of Don Dorsey’s soundtracks for Disney attractions at Epcot, full of fizzing futuristic electronic energy and perverse optimism, while ‘Family Feudal’ begins with genuinely laugh-out-loud faux pas culled from shows like Family Fortunes, before being taken into a mournful conclusion by Spafford’s cello, angry loops and an oddly unsettling segue into Satie.

Taken as a whole, A Hopeless Place leaves an uncertain, unresolved impression on the listener. There are difficult themes at work here, if you search them out, hiding beneath the splotches of sonic colour that dominate the trio’s music. How you elect to interpret those, just as with any work of art, in whatever discipline, is entirely up to you. You can be horrified, despondent, amused, ignorant or – if you perhaps hear the echo of a terror that dominated your early years – deeply terrified all over again.

A Hopeless Place by Tears|Ov is released November 1 2019 by The Wormhole.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.

YOVA – Moondog

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YOVA are a five-piece group centred around the hypnotic vocal of Jova Radevska, whose near-whispered delivery is inflected with an effortless, mesmerising post-R&B soulfulness.

On their debut track ‘Moondog’, Radevska’s haunting voice is offset by a shimmering, sparse accompaniment from Alex Thomas (drums), Grumbling Fur’s Daniel O’Sullivan (bass, Mellotron and programming), Martin McDougall (kalimba) and PJ Harvey acoloyte Rob Ellis on Ondes Martenot. The result is something rooted in earthly concerns of forgiveness and emotional upheaval yet positioned with a grandeur that is entirely astral in its breadth.

Presaging a remix EP in November and a full album in 2020, YOVA today revealed the hauntingly noir Christian Barnett-directed video for ‘Moondog’, draped in vintage monochrome texture and jerky motion reminiscent of the earliest silent movies. Watch the video below.

Words: Mat Smith

The Fantastic Plastics – Malfunction

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviews2 Comments

Recorded over a period of two years at their brilliantly-monikered CoCo Beat Studios in Brooklyn, Malfunction is the follow-up to The Fantastic Plastics’ 2015 debut album, Devolver. As with that first record, the order of events here is hyperactive tracks threaded with spiky guitar riffs, buzzing synths and chunky drums that offer up a futuristic vision of pop drawing a line back to the most effervescent and innovative moments of electrically-infused post-punk.

From the energetic forward motion and symbolism of ‘Numan’ (with its general nod in the direction of the erstwhile Gary Webb and possibly Wayne Knight’s annoying character in Seinfeld) to the insistent high-speed glam-punk of opening track ‘Disintegration’, Malfunction is (mostly) an upbeat record. The harmonic interplay between the band’s Tyson Plastic and Miranda Plastic has a gleeful charm, even if their outwardly euphoric tracks appear to mask a general cynicism at the state of the world today. The effect, on the sinewy, Cars-y ‘Telephone’ or the feisty political grandstanding of ‘Disconnect’ – a thinly-veiled bash at a certain high profile abusing the freedom of social media – is slightly disorienting: here you are, pogo-ing around like a complete lunatic, and then when you start to focus in on the lyrics, you realise you’re actually hearing a cheerful protest song.

The frantic pace drops just twice, once on the charming space-age instrumental vintage synth interlude ‘Neon Satellite’ and again – briefly – with the jangly guitar intro to the otherwise perky ‘Bad Day’. The latter has a brilliant, cutesy quality that wouldn’t go amiss on a kids’ TV show, even if its theme – about either being chronically hungover or clinically depressed – sit slightly uncomfortably with the joyous ‘la-la-la’ing and generally upbeat mood of Miranda’s delivery.

The standout track here, ‘Evacuate’, finds Tyson doing a brilliant impersonation of Phil Oakey’s leaden delivery, its lyrics and insistent guitar riffery urging us to get the hell out of dodge before the world ends. That it ends suddenly with a brief, dissonant electronic tone suggests we didn’t quite make it, but if this album was the last thing you heard before the world ended, frankly it doesn’t seem like the worst way to go.

Malfunction by The Fantastic Plastics was released October 4.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.

Circuit3 – The Price Of Nothing & The Value Of Everything

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“My debut album sold out, so I spent all the money on more synths,” says Dublin’s Peter Fitzpatrick, who trades under the name Circuit3.

His third album, the sagely-titled The Price Of Nothing & The Value Of Everything follows a 2017 collection of Yazoo covers and vocal contributions to Jonteknik’s intensely-personal Alternative Arrangements LP from last year. Both projects were reverential, in similar ways: they both looked back wistfully on songs that were important to their creators, songs that inspired their own individual musical journeys and fervent experiments with electronic music technology.

A prevailing sense of nostalgia for the best-preserved vintages of 1980s synthpop can be felt throughout Fitzpatrick’s latest record. This isn’t remotely intended as an insult. In Fitzpatrick’s hands, the signature sounds, drum machine rhythms and lyrical stylings of that era are handled with exceptional care, with the fragile mystique of a track like ‘Face In The Crowd’ sounding like a newly-discovered tape of a Reset Records session left in a dusty corner of Vince Clarke’s Splendid studio space.

Throughout the record there is a deep connection to the vibrancy and forward-looking – yet alien-sounding – optimism that came with that period of electronic pop music: that sense of punk rock (and its post-punk reconfiguration) sounding as dated and irrelevant as the hairy prog music that punk spat at so vehemently. Partly this is down to the palette of period synths that Fitzpatrick uses, and partly it’s a consequence of his vocal style. On tracks like the standout ‘Electric’ or ‘The Rain’, you hear a questing, unresolved quality in that voice, a sort of searching and uncertainty that offsets the shimmering melodies and arpeggios that characterise the ten tracks here. The effect is gently disorientating, being neither fully happy on the most upbeat of tracks or fully maudlin on the most saddening of ballads.

Perhaps the most surprising moment here comes with the cynicism and anguish of closing track ‘For Your Own Good’, a sparse, infectious, chunky little gem of a pop song which jerks back and forth along a pleasantly unpredictable, carefully randomised pathway. As I always suspected, The Price Of Nothing & The Value Of Everything tells me that the future I wanted is hiding squarely in the past.

The Price Of Nothing & The Value Of Everything by Circuit3 was released October 1 2019 by Diode Records.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.

Twenty-Three Hanging Trees – Cat’s Cradle

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Another week, another immediately sold-out cassette on Stuart McLean’s eclectic Bibliotapes. This time around the subject is Kurt Vonnegut’s allegorical Cat’s Cradle (1963), and the artist offering up a soundtrack is Twenty-Three Hanging Trees, the alias of UK-based French electronic musician Xavier Watkins.

For a book so intertwined with dramatically apocalyptic sentiment, Watkins’ accompaniment is surprisingly and remarkably ephemeral. Fuzzy melodies and gauzy atmospheres dominate the eleven tracks, creating a sort of detached, observational response to Vonnegut’s dark humour. The album’s most dramatic moments come on ‘As It Happened’, finding Watkins creating a soundfield of crackling static approximating the terminal solidifying of the world’s oceans thanks to the escape of the ‘ice nine’ chemical on the island shores of San Lorenzo; the piece is full of a nauseating, unstoppable terminal motion, reaching a crescendo as gentle liquified ripples are replaced by a horrifying stillness.

Elsewhere, ‘The Illustrious Hoenikkers’ finds layers and cycles of vintage, fluttering synthesizer passages, full of mystery and retro-futuristic promise; its gentle phasing and questing arpeggios recall the earliest electronic albums, only offset by a brooding sense of things being far from optimistic. The languid guitar-like textures and delicate melodic washes of ‘I See The Hook’ are arguably among the most surprising moments here given that their serene tonalities are paired to the San Lorenzo ruler’s favoured form of execution and dictatorial enforcement.

Cat’s Cradle by Twenty-Three Hanging Trees was released by Bibliotapes on September 27 2019 and is now sold out. A digital version is available at Bandcamp.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.

electronic mOnkee – mOnkee kingdom

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When I was ten years old, I came to own my first computer – an Amstrad CPC464, complete with integrated cassette loader and accompanied by a green-screen monitor. I divided my leisure time between playing with my Star Wars figures and Transformers while waiting the interminable period for games to load on the Amstrad, programming rudimentary little things in BASIC or playing out on the street. My embarrassing attempts at making music with computers were a whole hardware upgrade and around five years away.

And so it’s hard not to be impressed by mOnkee kingdom, a six-track EP of short electronic music vignettes by ten year old Clement Street as electronic mOnkee. On the evidence of tracks like the skittish, hyperactive ‘demented robot’ or ‘NERDY’, it suggests that Clement was brought up listening to the music of Mike Paradinas’s Planet Mu imprint instead of more predictable children’s fare like The Wiggles.

These are tracks filled with imaginative clashes between hardcore vacuum cleaner non-melodies, flashes of calypso-jazz piano and beats that have a go-anywhere randomness, giving each piece an unpredictable, edgy dimension. For me, the standouts are ‘sci-fi-ify that sound’ and ‘twilight octopus’ thanks to the addition of some neat sounds that evoke the memories of my beloved Amstrad’s cassette-noise squealing.

Any fundraising I did as ten year old was confined to sponsored whatevers at school – rounders, silences, spelling tests, etc – but then again we lacked both imagination and the ability to crowdfund in 1986. As if it wasn’t impressive enough that Clement made the EP, proceeds from its sale go toward an ethical store being set up in St. Neots, Cambridgeshire that will offer things like eco refills, coffee and in-house production of vegan chocolate. The crowdfunding page can be reached here.

Buy mOnkee kingdom at Bandcamp.

Words Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.

The Night Monitor – This House Is Haunted // Phono Ghosts – Warm Pad, Sharp Stab

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Two new releases from Blackpool’s Neil Scrivin, an electronic music maverick who also records under the alias Meatbingo.

The first, This House Is Haunted, is yet another gem of a release on Stuart McLean’s Bibliotapes cassette imprint, now long since sold out. The Bibliotapes ethics is to curate soundtracks to accompany a book, and Scrivin’s chosen subject is Guy Lyon Playfair’s account of the purported poltergeist haunting at a house in Enfield that caught the imagination of the media in the late Seventies. Whether the events in Enfield were true or a complete hoax developed by teenage imagination and fuelled by tabloid curiosity matters not to Scrivin; his soundtrack under a new alias, The Night Monitor, is bestowed with a paranormal creepiness – heavily-shrouded melodies emerge out of thick rivers of ectoplasm, looped voices chatter and babble incoherently, and thudding percussive sounds evoke the phantasmic movement of furniture.

The occluded tonalities of standout moments like ‘One For No, Two For Yes’ or ‘Ten Coincidences’ will give chills to anyone who spent their childhood evenings cowering behind the sofa because of an especially vivid Doctor Who episode or who couldn’t sleep thanks to the BBC’s hammy Ghost Watch (which was inspired by the Enfield haunting). However, Scrivin’s conceit is not to lace pieces like the evocative, static-hued soundfield of ‘I Can’t Make That Noise’ – a collage of whining drones, clamouring, scratchy sounds and a truly terrifying bass anchor – with a schlocky sequence of hauntological reference points. In doing so, This House Is Haunted is poised somewhere between the terrifying and inquisitive. Its twenty cues face inexplicable phenomena with an overriding sense of fear yet an underlying nausea-inducing intrigue, the final echoes of concluding piece ‘The Enfield Syndrome’ casting a long sonic shadow long after it has dissipated in silence.

A different – and potentially more visceral and relatable – sort of haunting takes place on Warm Pad, Sharp Stab, Scrivin’s fourth album as Phono Ghosts. Here you find the same melodic sensibilities melodies that colour This House Is Haunted, just set in a wholly different context, the result being a deft lightness thanks to being positioned as the top line in cuts that don’t rely on creepy textures for their emotional impact.

Instead, Phono Ghosts deals with the spectres of Eighties R&B and soulful electro – all fat digital basslines, chunky rhythms and a presentation that leans into a half-remembered pop vernacular. That tracks like the upbeat ‘L’Amour And Her Hot-Wired Hands’, the shimmering PWL-esque refrain of the serene ’81 Love’ or the emotional grandeur of the muted ‘Tears Over Chroma’ were not executed during digital synthesis’s takeover of music beggars belief.

Curiously, the melodic quotient isn’t the only crossover with The Night Monitor. On this brilliant collection you also find disembodied voices fluttering gently into view, only here they are vestiges of forgotten soul tracks, not the chance capture of elusive spirit echoes.

This House Is Haunted by The Night Monitor was released September 6 2019 by Bibliotapes and is sold out. A digital version will be released by Fonolith on October 25 2019.

Warm Pad, Sharp stab by Phono Ghosts was released September 13 2019 by Fonolith.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.

Rupert Lally – Dune

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviews1 Comment

Lally - Dune Tape

My youth was, I now realise, haunted by Dune. My mother, sensing a Star Wars-led interest in science fiction films, bought my an empty Panini sticker album that was issued to go along with David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s celebrated novel. No one else at my primary school was collecting the stickers, and with no one to swap the endless, frustrating supply of duplicate stickers I invariably ended up with, it languished, unfinished until it found itself in the bin. Later still, I ended up receiving a copy of the 1992 Amiga computer game from a friend and, like a lot of games, I was utterly hopeless at it and I guess I either offloaded it back to that friend or it went off to some floppy disc recycling place upon the occasion of one of my successive house moves.

So to say I have mixed feelings about Dune is an understatement. Those youthful experiences have meant I never bothered to read the book, and I’d rather watch Eraserhead or The Elephant Man over Lynch’s take on Dune. I know – sacrilege, right?

But maybe there’s hope for me yet in the form of Rupert Lally’s brilliant new soundtrack to Herbert’s book, released as part of the Bibliotapes series. Lally is no stranger to this endeavour, releasing a coveted score to another sci-fi novel, John Wyndham’s The Day Of The Triffids, via the label earlier this year. Herbert’s book was originally presented in the science fiction periodical Analog, and, perhaps with intentional reverence, Lally enriches these 26 evocative cues with a beautifully-rendered analogue synth spice (pun intended).

Pieces like ‘Giedi Prime’, ‘Remember The Tooth!’ and ‘Leave No Trace’ proceed on prowling, throbbing bass tones full of both threat and mystery, representing a recognisable stylistic motif that runs through the whole of Lally’s vivid score. There are moments, such as on ‘A Deal With Kynes’, where those tones eddy upward with aggressive and intensifying malice, signalling danger, while elsewhere they ebb away into distant, mollified texture.

And yet nestled within these bleak wastelands of atmospheric sound, we find the spiralling melodies, intensifying arpeggios and pulsing beats of the singular ‘Wormsign’, representing a seamless entanglement of Seventies space disco, progressive house and Eat Static-y galactic psychedelia.

The fifty copies of the cassette edition of Lally’s Dune justifiably sold out in record time. Fortunately, these absorbing, pulse-sharpening tracks are all available at Rupert’s Bandcamp page, a link to which can be found below. I’m now finally going to go and track down a copy of Herbert’s book. It’s about time…

Dune by Rupert Lally was released September 13 2019 by Bibliotapes.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.

Brook – Built You For Thought

On By miyagi42In Album reviews2 Comments

Informed by thought and feeling, rather than fashion and nostalgia, beneath a backdrop of well-thumbed science fiction paperbacks, the debut album from Brook creates a soundtrack to the loneliness of romance gone wrong, a longing for the past to be corrected by the future

The wonderfully-titled ‘Prince’ is propelled by an Escher-style arpeggio from Howard Rider, which enables vocalist Beth Brooks’ voice to swoop and spiral around it, like a sophisticated cat taking occasional swipes at a persistent wasp.

Whiplash snares, isolated pianos and synthetic music box melodies complement the emotional weight of the confessional nature of the lyrics, while also providing a safety net letting Brooks’ elegant trapeze act soar above it. The temptation may have been to match the scale of the vocals with layers and layers of sound but that would have been suffocating and overpowering. Instead, the music swells and crashes. Standout track ‘Everglades’ swaggers confidently on to the dancefloor, heartbroken but defiant.

So many musicians still feel the need to fill the kettle above the water line; it’s pleasing that Brook have adhered to the recommended level, both in content and quantity. By taking a nuanced and subtle approach, the two distinct elements of Built You For Thought combine to create a cohesive, timeless, whole.

Built You For Thought by Brook is released on September 20 2019 by VeryRecords.

Words: David Best. David Best is from Brighton’s Fujiya & Miyagi.

(c) 2019 David Best for Further.