Front & Follow and the Gated Canal Community present YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE – alternative soundtracks to a luxury apartments advert, featuring 31 artists including Field Lines Cartographer, Elizabeth Joan Kelly, Her Majesty’s Coroner for Wirral, The Leaf Library, Polypores, Hattie Cooke and many more.

Why? We aren’t sure, but it all started with this video and went from there.

GRAB THE ALBUM HERE NOW

This project is not affiliated with Deansgate Square in any way – the video was our inspiration for this project, and for each artist’s soundtrack.

All sales from this release will go to Coffee4Craig, which provides vital support for Manchester’s homeless and people in crisis. Find out more here – coffee4craig.com.

“Sharply dressed sales assistants and eagle-headed PPI enthusiasts march over freshly risen piazzas. Oxbow lakes of cement dissolve into dreamy quadrants. A Yo Sushi was there.
Now it isn’t.

This is where the gold is. The real gold, tucked under the receding gum-lines of once cobbled streets, stuffed into the rain-tinted domes hidden in plain view. Ignore the fringe of green that laps forever onto the city’s shores. Forget the municipal spaces, their fleshy tales creeping from beneath roller shutters and seeping from the cracks in boarded windows.

And as you stride about with vertical chin, you feel a prickle inside of something sharp but unfamiliar. Like a snagged cricket jumper you begin to unravel, spooling out behind yourself as you walk ever onwards.

Find them in the Imitation Rothko Gymnasium.
Smashing it in the Imitation Rothko Gymnasium.”

Art of Beatz Radio is celebrating 17 years on the air - incredible work, and hugely impressive as we have struggled to keep this GCC show on the road for a much shorter period of time!

As part of the celebrations, The Gated Canal Community Radio Show was invited to do a guest mix - we provided an hour of the usual GCC nonsense (minus crisp chat), including some tracks from the archives (aka the CDs from the early 2000s that Justin found in the loft).

It also gave us an opportunity to play some absolute classics from Kemper Norton, Plaid and Boobs of Doom.

You can go listen to the mix here on mixcloud, and you can download it here too.

Here’s the full tracklist:

1.     Dolly Dolly – It Doesn’t Mean Anything To Me

2.     A.R.C. Soundtracks – MAST

3.     Susumu Yokota – Reflux

4.     Time Attendant – Entry Into The Atomic Club

5.     Kemper Norton - Helston Music Fair 1992

6.     BLK w/BEAR - Weggewaschen

7.     Pan American - Coastal

8.     Her Majesty’s Coroner for Wirral – Magical Greetings

9.     The Dead Texan – Girth Rides a (Horse) +_

10.   Grey Frequency – Broadhaven (1977)

11.   Beachers – S.ensitive

12.   Com Truise – Persuasion System

13.   Sleep Cadet – Looks Realistic

14.   Plaid - Housework

15.   Boobs of Doom – STONERSLOTH

Art of Beatz streams on Vancouver’s CO-OP Radio, and is the work of Kuma and AoB Motomasa.

The GCC connection comes via the wonderful Soundtracking The Void label, which has released Kuma as well as GCC’s very own The Incidental Crack.

Regarding The Auguries is the fourth album from Philadelphia-based electronic unit Alka. Originally a solo project of Bryan Michael, Regarding The Auguries finds Alka reconfigured as a trio of Bryan, fellow electronic musician Todd Steponick and visual artist Erika Tele, a line-up familiar from their pre-lockdown live sets. 

The album is Alka’s second release on VeryRecords, the label set up by Erasure’s Vince Clarke in 2016. Though largely completed before the world lurched toward its current pandemic-stricken state, Regarding The Auguries taps into the feeling of general unease that anticipated it, its title a reference to the ancient Roman belief that the future could be foretold through the behaviour of birds. 

Bryan, Todd and Erika told Gated Canal Community about the genesis of the eleven tracks on the album, dealing with unintentional odes to early 80s electronic music, Japanese mythology and unsettling earthly phenomena. 

FRACTURED TIME 

Bryan Michael: The progression of this track had a lot to do with Vince Clarke. He wanted more from it. It was originally a very verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, and I just shouldn’t even get involved with that sort of stuff – I just can’t pull it off! I’m not Vince Clarke. I’m not the pop hit guy. This was one of the times where Todd rescued the track and said, “Let me at it.” And he deconstructed it and I became energised by what Todd did. I don’t want to say we pulled it out of the trash, but I felt like we made it into something completely different. It’s an odd structure, but there’s something to be said for strange song structures. 

Todd Steponick: Vince saw a lot in there. He saw an epic track. He saw something in it and he knew how to push it. 

BM: I think the structure needed to be non-linear. Like, it’s about fractured time, so why would we make it into this kind of very logical structure?

WIDTHCHILD

BM: This track was originally very minimal. It was a very IDM, very raw, very sparse, glitchy kind of track. It was in some sort of weird time signature and all off-beat. It sort of existed within itself, and Todd was able to deconstruct that and make order out of that chaos.

TS: Vince wanted more funk in it, and I did my best. Bryan does a lot of these kind of strange cuts. The way Bryan cuts things, it shifts everything off a quarter note or something, or an eighth of a note and you barely notice it. It all sounds like it makes sense, but when I lay out these tracks on a grid, everything’s way off. I really admire the way Bryan breaks these predictable expectations. What he did at the end of the track just fills my head with these images of wide open architecture and shafts of light coming down. 

FAITO 

Erika Tele: In Japanese, the title is pronounced ‘fai-toh’. It’s basically a Japanese pronunciation of the English word ‘fight’. So you hear it a lot growing up in Japan, especially at school or team events; it’s used as sort of an encouragement, to push someone along if they’re having a difficult time. People yell, “faito, faito!” in a spirit to power through.

TS: That feels sort of timely, right? Now, more than ever, it feels like you have endure and keep going. 

ET: I really wanted to have that positive encouraging spirit in this song, whether it’s for myself or others. Even if things are rough to get through, you just have to push along. I referenced things in my life that spoke to me, in this song. There’s also a lot of Japanese cultural and mythological references in ‘Faito’.

TS: We were looking at the power of myth to aid us in the struggle against everything that’s fighting us. We think that Erika has the answers and she knows where to find them. 

BM: We need her to keep telling us to ‘faito’. 

EARTH CRISIS 

BM: I was intrigued by these sky sounds that were being recorded throughout the world and put on YouTube. They were just so dark and mysterious and it’s like, where did these come from? What is this sound? Some of them are probably hoaxes, but I started looking for answers in the mystery of what these sky sounds were, and a lot of it was earth distress, geophysical anomalies – everything from that to the angelic harkening of the end of the world. 

I discovered that there was this fellow named William R. Corliss that researched a lot of these anomalies in science. He scoured nature journals and science journals to discover things that weren’t quite answered or understood at the time, but that still made it into these scientific journals. So he pieced all these factual information findings together into a series of books, and so on the sleeve we cited the APA citation for his book, Earthquakes, Tides, Unidentified Sounds And Related Phenomena. A lot of these sounds are hoaxes, but then one of our friends in the UK posted a video of himself mildly freaking out to the sky, which is literally groaning. Here was a first-hand account of someone experiencing these sounds, so we asked his permission to use his recording in the track. 

TS: This was entirely Bryan's work. Whatever the pretext, he has a way of turning doom into sound: it’s this heavy, humid dread that never lifts, like on a summer night when you know a thunderstorm’s needed. When is the release coming? With ‘Earth Crisis’, it never comes. And there’s some damn good synth sounds in there Bryan, I might add. 

BM: People just started hearing these sounds, and they started recording them with their cellphones. Was it just a 2012 sort of end of the world phenomenon? Well, that probably played into a lot of it, but going back, I was able to find that, actually, these sounds have been heard throughout history by indigenous people, and by scientists, and that’s why the APA citation came in. That’s kind of the validation for it. The song is basically about the mystery. It’s about the quest to understand mystery and how exciting that can be. I love how Erika, later on in the album, says “Stepping into the mystery.” That just sort of describes it, and describes that feeling. 

SCRAPPLE 

ET: This was a really fun song to do. I enjoyed being able to shout on this track.

BM: We love juxtaposition. The recording of ‘Scrapple’ was amazing, and it was all Erika. Whereas ‘Faito’ was a call for support and encouragement, ‘Scrapple’ was almost like a call to arms.

ET: Around the time we wrote this, you had all the protests and riots going on in France – the yellow jackets, the gilets jaunes – and there was a bit of that steam coming off, and some of that aggression that was building up. 

BM: This is another track that was supported by Vince’s producer mind. Originally it was pretty much an instrumental, and he was like, “Let’s try some vocals.” It inspired us to go further with it, and that wound up as us basically shouting at Erika to shout into a microphone in my garage! 

ET: ‘Scrapple’ also resonated energy from the track ‘Los Niños Del Parque’ by Liaisons Dangereuses. Vince and Reed Hays had played this on their radio show about a week before we did the vocal for this, and I think I was channelling that song here. 

SOURCERY 

BM: We uses a sample of Boris Karloff on this track. I love his voice and I love horror movie samples, so that happened to work its way in there. And then you have Erika’s amazing lyrics – “multiple, singular, modular, linear”. I love that. It’s kind of subtle. It’s a well-needed break in-between encouraging people and fighting them, and rioting, and the collapse of the earth system. 

The lyrics “multiple, singular, modular, linear” were meant for another track, but they just worked their way into this song too. I was working on both tracks at the same time, and they branched off and formed into two different things. 

MY HEART 

ET: I had to make myself very vulnerable for this one. I had to step out a little bit and just go for it. I wanted to capture that fragility. The instrumental was so dreamy and lovely and I wanted to complement that with the words and with the melody. I wanted it to be a really tender song. 

BM: You succeeded. There’s a little burst of radio at the beginning. That was just random chance. I was into sampling radio frequencies – flipping through the stations and seeing what comes up, and that’s where the vocal burst of “my heart” came from. It sort of inspired the whole song. It was just a lovely chance sort of thing. 

TS: There were so many versions of this track – how far back does this go Bryan? 

BM: It goes right back before my first album. It was a song called ‘A Dog Loose In The Woods’, which never made it to my first album, and it never made it to my second album which was called A Dog Lost In The Woods. It’s just the idea of a song never being completely done. I just kept revisiting it, because I always thought there was something there in the melancholy melodies. I put a radio on, “my heart” came out and Erika went with that theme. 

TS: There’s a whole trail of beautiful experiences with the different versions of this song. I really love all of them, and they’re all really lovely tunes. Some of them were brighter than others. Some of them were faster. But this one – it just has this feeling of a beautiful truth and that vulnerability that Erika spoke about. There’s also something intimate, something uncomfortable, but not bad. Bryan gets that out of the music and Erika just completes it with her vocals. 

BM: Todd is not only my co-collaborator, but he’s also my archivist. He keeps me organised. I’ll have any number of tracks that I’ll forget about or throw out, and Todd will rescue something one day, out of the blue, and say, “Hey, do you remember you did this?” That’s where ‘Faito’ came from too. ‘Faito’ was just a sort of drum loop that I’d recorded, thought, “Hey this is great!” and never got around doing anything more with. Then one day Todd shows up to band practice with this fully fleshed-out amazing track that we just took where it is now. This is how Alka works: we play off each other to create a song that could never exist without the three of us. 

SOLFÈGE 

BM: This is all about the lyrics, and again it’s that idea of stepping into the mystery. We’ve all heard that ‘do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do' rhyme growing up, and that’s an example of a solfège. When I was growing up, I was just like, “That’s an octave – they’re just singing the notes, and there are words for the notes of an octave.” For this track, I started to delve deeper, and I discovered this has some pretty interesting occult connections. 

TS: We hadn’t noticed it at all, but Vince felt that this had a sort of gospel sound to this, so we kind of went in that direction with organ sounds and clapping. We recorded the handclaps in Bryan’s garage. There’s also a tiny soul music sample in there attached to a breakbeat which seemed to play into the vibe that Vince heard. 

BM: It’s just about juxtapositions that we play on. That means you can have a song about the darker meanings behind something you hear everyday, yet throw in soul music samples. It works. I was also going after this feeling of the unknown, and what that would sound like in a song. 

TS: I think we generally have like a deep appreciation of big unknown lands, like the lands beyond the horizon. Somewhere that’s not south New Jersey, basically.  

DOUBT 

BM: I was always drawn to this track. I felt like it was very like the Berlin school of ambient electronic stuff. This came out of a discarded loop from a track and Todd just took it places. 

TS: I took one of his tracks and slowed it down, got a loop out of it, and that became the foundation. We fell in love with this one idea, and from there it just went on. I ended up loading it with vocal samples, drawing from philosophy and other areas, gave it all to Bryan and he rightfully got rid of pretty much most of it. All for the better. Some of the core bits were about doubt, and I guess I’ve just been thinking about that a lot. When you look at the cultural landscape there’s a lot of people just accepting the most erroneous of ideas. There’s no critical thought process, and we can see how dangerous that is. Doubt starts the process of cutting through it; to hopefully arrive at something of integrity, some closer idea of truth.  

BM: On this album, we credited ourselves not just with the synth and the vocals, but with ‘worry’, ‘fear’ and ‘doubt’. I just feel it makes sense. This track is very unsure. 

TS: There’s a theme of disillusionment that runs through the album, from ‘Fractured Time’ onwards, and I think I was playing off of that. 

BM: Somehow this became a very timely record. Even though it’s been delayed for so long because of things, it does feel very timely in its themes.

TS: Erika had done the lyrics for something else, and I found them and thought, “No, this works.” Doubt is often personified as a demon, so I just thought this belonged – it was playing off of other things, in my mind, and some of it ended up on the track.

ET: I think sometimes it’s the state we’re in when we work together, where we’re just reflecting what’s going on in the world. We meet up, we see how we’re all feeling, and that informs what comes out. At times we have this synergy that we try to encourage in each other, but really the demon of the creative process is when you start doubting yourself. Each time we meet up to rehearse, we bring whatever’s going on in our lives. But somehow every time we met up in Bryan’s garage, everything would be just fine. Like our energies would lock in and our worries evaporate through the music (at least for me!).  Like with ‘Scrapple’ – I had work stuff going on and that just kind of built together into this energy which we brought into the music. You can’t help it.  

BM: We wanted to make an electronic album made by humans. It’s always been one of the classic critiques of electronic music: “Oh, it’s just robotic.” It’s just people pushing buttons. But that’s the thing – it’s still humans making it. 

DEAD LIKE ME 

BM: I didn’t realise it at the time, but the title ‘Dead Like Me’ feels like a reference to connecting with two other individuals - Erika and Todd - that understand me for who I am. I didn’t want to paint them as dead, so it was also a comical reference, which I only picked up shortly afterwards. It’s about connecting with people and then Erika took it further with the concept. I thought that people would think that the main synth line came from Vince, but I created that synth line! Somehow, I managed to subconsciously sound like Vince Clarke, which is funny. 

ET: Well, I have to say, there was a bit of an ode to Vince Clarke in the vocal. 

BM: Oh wow, okay, so it’s all coming out now! This is the Vince Clarke tribute track – 

TS: – he worked on! 

BM: Wow. That’s just weird.

ET: I think I felt a lot of past memories in this song. I thought the bassline felt very nostalgic, and reminded me of that era of music, so I wanted to reflect that in the vocal. 

KING CARD 

BM: Elizabeth Joan Kelly contributed to this track. So here’s where I just really enjoy connections through just strange experiences: Elizabeth Joan Kelly is a fellow librarian who lives in New Orleans, but who also happens to be a pretty amazing electronic musician in her own right. She released an album recently called Music For The DMV. 

This track only got finished in lockdown. I was never quite happy with the sound, but during lockdown I made it sound even more sort of claustrophobic, which reflected how we were feeling at the time. ‘King Card’ is a reference to the tarot, and the idea of prophesying future events. In many ways, the album title Regarding The Auguries really does make sense for this album. We played with that title for a while, and we weren’t really sure if it made sense, but it really does when you think about everything that’s going on in the world right now. 

Regarding The Auguries by Alka was released October 9 2020 by VeryRecords

As part of the recent and on-going ISOLATION AND REJECTION project by Front & Follow and Gated Canal Community, we’ve been collecting the stories behind the tracks submitted.

This is Part 2. Part 1 is here. All five volumes of the project are now available via the F&F bandcamp.

Names have been changed and redacted to protect the innocent and the guilty.

“We live in a society that discards human beings, which is wrong. As part of that, society says only some people should be allowed to make anything other than what they’re told to make by their employer. That makes us all worse off as both audience members and creators.”

“[the track] was rejected because I was trying for a particular sound and despite a lot of time and effort I couldn't get it to sound anything like it should have done so gave up on it. It's not actually that bad a song, I was just mardy at the time.

It was created in the Caustic app on my phone back in 2014, luckily I backed up all the project files before the phone died and I've been able to resurrect these, export stems and master. I've kept true to the original sounds and composition only using delay, reverb and EQ.”

“The origin of this track was an ambient / solo guitar piece that didn't make [REDACTED] made during lock-down. I then reworked it and submitted it to the [REDACTED] Isolation compilation but it didn't make that selection. When I saw the call for tracks for Gated Canal Community I started the track over, keeping the bare bones of the ambient and solo guitar but remixing then and slicing them up and creating a whole new track which is radically different from the tracks two previous incarnations. The piece now has beats and a lot of instrumentation that it only got once it became reborn for this collection. The title was a bit tongue-in-cheek but seems to work to me.”

“This track has sat unreleased and overlooked for a year or so. It’s just a quick blast that was fun to make—all done using soft synths and some drum machine samples. It’s very short and rather unrefined—some simple riffs with a bit of squelching, a pad that howls and an ersatz guitar line from a dodgy alien disco. Faster than nearly all of my other tracks, almost a bit punky.”

“This was a bi-product of a lockdown album made by the band I'm in [REDACTED] for the [REDACTED] label, and was used for a one off broadcast by [REDACTED], who do site specific experimental audio broadcasts.”

“It started with a short vocal sample, various noises were added and it ended up as a track that bears zero resemblance to the lo-fi drone / guitar-based ambient album that I'm working on at the moment! Rather than ending up in my ever-growing folder of unreleased demos, I decided to inflict it upon the GCC community - sorry!”

“Was asked to submit a remix which was rejected by the artist”

“I recall with great joy discovering the philosophy and music of John Cage. I enjoy the playful, enchanting sounds of his 1948 Suite for Toy Piano. The percussive mechanical sound of the keys hammering metal rods and church bell like sounds resonating from within.

I was very fortunate to receive as a birthday present a rather splendid vintage wooden toy grand piano. Over the years I have composed various pieces for toy piano and a large part of its charm is two of the fourteen keys are damaged and sound broken. Consequently I created a body of work entitled ‘Broken Toy Pianos’ that exist essentially for my own pleasure - not for public consumption.

With the World currently in a state of lockdown due to the deadly Covid-19 and many people feeling isolated and rejected - I felt this to be an appropriate time to share my rejected broken toy piano piece to a wider audience.”

“This track is constructed from processed location recordings of Brides Beck, layered with self generating modular patches.

Originally intended to be part of this [REDACTED], it didn't really fit with the other tracks.

Can you reject yourself from your own release?”

“Sometime around 2000-2001, a good friend and I worked on a recording together with no real plan other than to make a piece of music. Just a little ditty involving tape machines, samples and loops, etc. We weren’t even sure whether it was finished or not when we were done and it ended up in storage somewhere.

Over time, my friend and I lost touch, and I found out that he was sadly no longer with us. I eventually came across the tune again and thought it would be nice to do something with it, but still I had no idea what. I figured perhaps this compilation might be a suitable home for this odd little item.”

“The track was part of a series of smaller tracks recorded after a bout of heavy depression. I struggled with being a new dad and would often take 5-minute breaks in the garden to escape the noise and clear my head.

During some of these breaks, I would write intentionally sparse and simple melodies on guitar or piano and record them quickly and crudely with the intention of sprinkling them throughout my album. In the end I changed my mind and made the album a lot shorter, cutting out most of these smaller tracks.

The album was rejected by every label I sent it to.

YASSS!!!”

“Over the years I've had so many songs dumped/rejected/ignored/forgotten about for all sorts of projects - mostly well-meaning tribute albums for bands that, it turns out, didn't have quite as many people willing to do cover versions as the organisers thought, but also for a whole heap of "great ideas" from people who call you "mate" for several weeks then stop answering emails altogether.

This song's one of the latter, done for a recent gig/benefit right at the start of The Current Situation where they were extremely keen to have me do a song for them for several days and then clearly found someone more famous instead and blanked me forever.

It's lovely to know that you've already got so many tracks in, which must mean it's not just me!”

“After over 20 years as [REDACTED], and nearly 40 playing in bands, i have experienced a lot of rejection, disappointing at the time, but after a while it all becomes a blur. Promised releases or gigs which fade into the past.... for some reason lost in the mists of time, this track didn't make it to any releases of that year and was forgotten.

It was found lurking in a folder called 'rough mixes 2016'. That's all i know.... forgotten and abandoned until now. listening back, i have no recollection of it, or why it was never used as i rather like it.”

“It's a track that never fitted anywhere. My music is normally quite dark, so an unexpectedly positive-sounding isolated one-off just doesn't fit. But I like it — and a brief respite from constant doom is a good thing I reckon.”

ISOLATION AND REJECTION is collating rejected sounds and celebrating them, raising money for The Brick, a fantastic charity in Wigan.

Buy Vol 1 here, and Vol 2 here. 3, 4 and 5 to come.

US-born, Krakow-based musician Greg Nieuwsma’s last album, Travel Log Radio, seemed to perfectly embody the disquieting feeling of early lockdown. Assembled from field recordings made in locations around the world, Travel Log Radio showed how suddenly things that we had taken for granted (perhaps) – the ability to freely go wherever you want in the world and the satiability of wanderlust that freedom of movement allowed – had been taken away from us. It was a haunting, uncomfortable listen in some ways; poignant and wistful in others. 

Rabbit Hole Variations, Nieuwsma’s new album, is no less haunting and uncomfortable, only in a completely different way. “The backstory is that one of my Twitter friends turned me on to Coltrane changes harmonic structures,” he told me. "That led me down a rabbit hole. While down that rabbit hole, I encountered another – generative music. To these I added a bit of this and a dash of that, and I spent the early lockdown mixing it all together.” 

The effect is like tumbling, Alice-style, into a strange, lysergic, dream-like world, somewhere between David Lynch and The Residents circa Commercial Album. The pieces are arranged like a single, seamless whole, each one taking on its own episodic quality that’s as similar to the next piece as it is different. There is a feeling of being slightly out of sync, though with what is unclear – Coltrane’s approach to altering the chords of his interpretations of standards, for example, still ultimately anchored the listener to the original piece; with generative music, it’s often unclear precisely which path a piece will take, making Nieuwsma’s concatenation of both theories a strange, yet rewarding listen. 

The album’s eight pieces are titled in such a way as to form a short verse – ‘take steps into the garden of respite, near the moon hills, where restless balloon animals float in circles that can only be squared, unwittingly, by butterflies whose wings are yet to be unfurled’. Taken as a whole, the tracks flow between the see-sawing melodies of ‘Unwittingly’ to the near-whimsical ‘In Circles That Can Only be Squared’. which sounds like it was fashioned from degraded Optigan loops. Elsewhere, ‘Into The Garden Of Respite’ has a meditative, pastoral quality that sounds like slightly surreal folk music while ‘Unfurled’ is a moment of unquestionable beauty. 

‘Where Restless Balloon Animals Float’ and ‘Take Steps’ are among the most sonically challenging tracks, both, in their own way, feeling like a trip to a freaky amusement park while rapidly losing your grip on reality. ‘Take Steps’ uses fragments of carousel music to create a blurry, disorienting atmosphere, while ‘Where Restless Balloon Animals Float’ slowly uncoils, almost like looking depairingly at your sagging reflection in a hall of mirrors. 

This is loop-based music forced where those loops don’t want to go, sounding skewed and wonky and vaguely uncomfortable. By the end, you no longer know which way is up and which way is down, whether you’ve listened to the album over and over or are still on your first play. It sidesteps the traditional trappings of self-generating music by having a distinctive personality all of its own rather than becoming ambient wallpaper. In so doing, it is maximalist where Travel Log Radio was beyond minimalist, and just the kind of thought-provoking, head-decluttering music you need as you contemplate another six months of restrictions. 

Rabbit Hole Variations by Greg Nieuwsma is released September 25 2020 by Wormhole World.

The piece below should be read whilst listening to the Blocklist Mix by Ruaridh Law / TVO - live on Reform Radio on Sunday 9th August at 6.26pm, and then via the stream above and via mixcloud.

How do you fall back in love with a city?

To map a city is to map yourself. You can study as many A to Zs, aerial photography and OS grids as you want – they don’t show the true image. Streets are functional worms of white, pushing through and into their siblings; some form a listless grid, waffles left to be scraped into the waste, whilst others curve and entwine like congealing spaghetti. These lines lose meaning when you look at them for too long – a trick of the light switching avenue to cul de sac and back.

The true map is the one you carry around with you. Ingrained on the insides of your eyelids, tattooed on your heart; grey blocks that cause anxiety attacks just by proximity, a rise of greenery causing elation. Memory and geography are so matted together as to become interchangeable.

To see the true map of a city, height is needed. Outlying hills, tower blocks, a spire; from here the city lies arranged out in a radius. A cordiform projection of the viewer’s lived experience – buildings sparkle from the corner of the eye, when sweeping the horizon. But so too are whole sections of the city greyed out.

Because to map a city is to map the pain that comes from living within it. And as emotional bonds within sever, so too do the connection between self and territory. When love comes to an end, so too does the landscape; buildings become greyed out, Qlippoth-like shells to be divided up like the more prosaic belongings; CDs, keys, clothing.

It’s possible, thus, to be forced to separate from the mapped sprawl as it is to leave a lover. And the sites of pain become no-go zones, locations to be blocked to match the phone numbers and emails to be blocked from your phone. It’s easy to forget these; until a wrong turn leads to

[AMERICAN POOL AND SNOOKER]

without warning. The building is there, sure, but a grey veneer – no features, like a mask. People pass in front and disappear, only to appear from the other side; but the camouflage is complete.

Or perhaps chance brings these into closer focus. New relationships, new maps and landmarks to claim; but without warning the areas-of-no-egress still push their way in, the subconscious easing through. A chance meeting suddenly reveals

[BOOK NOW FOR OUR CHRISTMAS PARTY NIGHTS]

an A-board sign sitting in front of another grey husk, hinting at what lies inside – past infidelities, sublimated pain.

It takes time to erase these tracks. And denial, erasure of all evidence, can only go so far – there’s more under there, gnawing at the hidden recess. Instead, peace needs to be made with the old ghosts.

So suddenly music deemed off limits become nostalgic. Books lain untouched for fear of catching the virus of longing can be thumbed through, carefully at first, and then with more energy; for the ghosts being exorcised don’t wear the scowl of demons, but instead a hopeful smile as they move into the ionosphere. And as they release, so too come the memories, un-trammelled by base-level pain and instead put into context – you, the map and the territory, indelibly altered but for good as well as ill. Time as healer – a cliché, its true – and a leveller, giver of a perspective and new way of reading the trail laid out. Suddenly, moments come into focus with buildings no longer grey but instead glistening with a possibility of the future and leaving the past behind;

A grey tenement with a model plane hanging above the spare bed

A pub holding its breath as a door bangs open

The alley behind a café with the smell of cigarette smoke like a haze

The lights of the city twinkling in the distance, reflecting on a reservoir

All the little lights sparkling, pushing through the monotone fascia.

And you throw the map aside, and strike up, out, onwards, pen in hand, blank paper in a clenched fist, ready to draw new maps, and no longer frightened of the faceless grey shapes that now – from height – resemble a horizon of beacon fires, drawing you towards them, and the future.

As part of the recent and on-going ISOLATION AND REJECTION by Front & Follow and Gated Canal Community, we’ve been collecting the stories behind the tracks submitted.

This is Part 1.

Names have been changed and redacted to protect the innocent and the guilty.

“The track was originally recorded near Maentwrog in 2018 as a cascading sequence which ultimately went nowhere. It was rejected as being unacceptably frisky.

Later, the idea arose of taking something deemed a failure and treating it as a piece of found sound. The piece was copied multiple times and remoulded in two phases: with time and pitch speeded up and slowed down, transforming the original by creating interference effects, phasing and waveform changes.

Not unlike the quantum mechanical phenomenon in which an electrically charged particle is affected by an electromagnetic potential, despite being confined to a region in which both the magnetic field and electric field are zero. But with shitloads of delay on it.”

“This track was intended to be the opening track on my most recent release. Unfortunately, it felt too earthy and a little too noisy, where [my work] is concerned with space, melody, fuzz optimism. It lived as the first track for a couple of weeks until it was removed. Rejected by its own maker - I'm sorry, little friend.”

“I wanted cheering up after hearing about Florian Schneider dying. It was going to be called Four to the Florian. That and I’d deleted my original submission for elsewhere in a fit of pique.”

“Diwddion (Welsh for ends/endings) is constructed from the run-out grooves of various pieces of iconic Welsh-language vinyl.

[REDACTED RECORD LABEL] announced a call for submissions for an experimental music compilation in late 2014 - a successor to their popular [REDACTED] release earlier that year. I sent them this track, they liked it but said it was too long, so I sent a shorter version but then they went quiet and nothing happened, likely because this was around the time that label co-founder [REDACTED]’s solo career was taking off.

They still had a weekly radio show though playing a quality eclectic mix of odd local and international sounds, so a couple of years later I sent a few CDRs of my various projects to them, including the track that was supposed to go on the compilation, hoping they might at least play some of it on the radio.

However, a couple of weeks after I sent it the radio show stopped and they announced they were closing the label. Just an unlucky coincidence, I'm sure. Most of the other music on the demo discs has since been released in various ways, but this now-twice-rejected track is seeing the light of day for the first time.”

"Ran Aground Off Thanet certainly makes me feel isolated and adrift.

It was written for an album I'm still working on called Lost Signals which explores absence and memory along the rapidly eroding east coast of England. The music was created using radio and field recordings made in bunkers, abandoned radar stations and disappearing pillboxes along the Holderness coastline.

This track was rejected as it didn't quite fit the sound or the concept enough to be included. Its title refers to the Margate lugger Victory, which was lost with all crew in 1857, as it set out to rescue stranded sailers in Botany Bay"

“Rejected by the esteemed [REDACTED] for the [REDACTED] compilation. This track is one of a suite that she wrote whilst teaching in London as a teaching aid for sensory experiences with pupils. Anyhow, I love it, and I love it more for being too weird for [REDACTED].”

“As an improv trio we do not rehearse or practice. However in the mid 2000s we frequently met in one of our living rooms to record. 'Sommerhit' is the result of one of these sessions. 'Summer Hit' because we were really enthusiastic about it, summer was just about to begin and our new track featured beats. Well, it featured the stuttering of a mixing board feedback chain, also one of us was very happy about a newly purchased russian test signal generator. The ears are still ringing.

'Sommerhit' conveyed bittersweet melancholia and nostalgia for us. Vienna, where all of us were living, is very quiet in summer and it is a morbid city in its best of times. The genres we call our home know no charts, no 'Summer Hit’ - a type of song that captures carelessness, a soundtrack for barbecues and beach fun. And yet euphoria guided our involuntary associations, of the taste of sun lotion and the rubbery smell of hot air mattresses, of loudly blasting 'Sommerhit' on the car stereo on our imaginary drive to the quarry pond.

A 'Summer Hit' is not a hit for very long. There is an expiration date. Planned obsolescence. Soon we would forget about our new track again but not before we got the opportunity to celebrate it.

Back in the day when you attended a concert of experimental electronic music, you often found yourself looking at someone sitting behind their laptop staring onto their screen. We always used a wide array of instruments and devices. When we were invited to play a 10 minute performance at a festival, setting up and clearing the stage would have taken us more than twice that time. So we had an idea.

Each of us put a pizza box in front of us with the lid open. There was nothing in them except for a discman plugged into a tiny mixer. We pressed play and a CD with 'Sommerhit' started playing while we kept staring into our empty pizza boxes.“

“It's a track I've had for a long time and has gone through 3-4 different versions. The first take was totally beatless and was based around a soundscapey drone type sound, but I stumbled on this great drum plugin and managed to make that crazy beat straight away. I let the track build its own momentum from there.”

“Last track recorded live at Eastville Project Space (Yeovil) - first day of the lockdown - grabbing some kit for home - mostly electronic components/soldering irons etc.. plugged in my Orla Ruby keyboard in the last 5 minutes before leaving - a total live jam - no edits - not my normal way of working - not made anything new since... 

Current situation has found me digging deep in past work etc (tapes/cdrs/mini-discs spanning decades), finding exciting things in long forgotten collaborations.  I seem to have lost, at this time, the need for making stuff - which is strange. 

Not touched anything I rescued from Eastville pre-lockdown - stumbled upon this though ... enjoy”

“This track is part of a project exploring quarantine. The first week is new and exciting, what does lockdown mean? what the hell is Furlough? why are people hoarding toilet roll? The next week is an eerie silence, you can hear the birds sing, the skies are clear, no trails from the planes, no murmur of traffic. Week three we are getting into a routine, always wash your hands for 20 seconds, don't touch your face, clap for the NHS, discover your town while doing daily exercise. Week 4 arrives, and you begin noticing the noises in the house and the weight of lockdown, and the lack of physical contact with people outside your house. Isolation. 

Over the years you work on new tracks, throw many away and arrive at something interesting, you send them off with the excitement you feel about creating something only to meet the wall of silence.

‘we will contact you if we think it is interesting’

‘we receive thousands of demos and don't have time to respond to everyone’.

Rejection.”

“This piece is several years old and was originally recorded as part of a split cassette with a certain noise artist. Ideas and sounds were exchanged, and things were moving along very nicely. I ended up re-working my tracks too many times, and I lost faith in my abilities. The project fizzled out soon after.”

“This orphaned 2015 track comes from an ambient collaboration project that never came to fruition. Jeffrey Sinibaldi shared field recordings of him dragging an axe across the concrete floor of his garage which JS Adams then processed and further manipulated.”

More soon.

ISOLATION AND REJECTION is collating rejected sounds and celebrating them, raising money for The Brick, a fantastic charity in Wigan.

Buy Vol 1 here, and Vol 2 here. 3, 4 and 5 to come.

Brighton-based electronic musician Simon James releases the latest in his meditative Room Tones series on July 16 2020. Room Tones Purple is the fifth in a colour-coded series of longform tracks that Simon began in lockdown with Room Tones Blue in May. The proceeds from each release go to Chestnut Tree House, the children’s hospice for East Sussex, West Sussex, Brighton and Hove and South East Hampshire. The hospice cares for 300 children and young adults up to the age of 19. Find out more about Chestnut Tree House here. 

Creating music has sometimes been a challenge in lockdown. I’m knackered. Everyone’s tired. Everyone’s just trying to deal with whatever’s going on at the moment, and to do anything creative – and lots of other things – you need that extra little bit of spark and energy. If you haven’t got it, you find yourself really fighting it. Sometimes it’s best to admit defeat for that day and hope that tomorrow your energy will be a bit better. 

I work with audio every day, and part of that involves producing podcasts. Due to coronavirus, all of a sudden things have been a bit crazy in that world. One of my clients has taken all of their physical events online, so they’re coming to me and saying, ‘Right, we need all this content from you – can you make it for us?’ I’ve been busier than I’ve ever been before. I’ve always tended to fit in making music around the jobs that pay the bills, which is how it is for a lot of people. Sometimes the balance is better and sometimes it’s worse. In this particular period, I was finding that I had zero time to make any music that I could really focus on. I was spending a lot of time sat in my studio, surrounded by my gear, but doing this sort of quite straight work – planning and working out who we were going to interview, and setting stuff like that up. 

I could see loads of people doing what they would describe as ‘lockdown tracks’, and putting all this stuff out. On the one hand I was thinking, 'It’s not fair – I want to do something!’ On the other hand, I was feeling like surely we’d had enough lockdown tracks and no one would want me to add to that. 

Then I had a thought: what if some mornings I got up and set up a self-generating patch on the Buchla? It would mean that I could be very hands-off. Once I’d set them up, I could get on with my work and let them play, in my room, quietly in the background. That’s why I came up with the name Room Tones for the pieces, because they were just sat there, doing their own thing in the background. 

I had some experience of doing that already. I worked on an installation at a gallery in Manchester, where I created these self-generating patches and made two forty-five minute pieces, which will be getting released next. It was basically for a pop-up space in a museum for Maggie’s Cancer Centres. It was an area where people could go and do some work, or they could relax and chill out, and there would be yoga sessions, and wellbeing things going on. The sounds I was making were meant to be played in there, and I remember thinking that it was really difficult: I knew that I could make it completely wallpapery and not really do anything, but that didn’t appeal to me; there wasn’t enough about it. And then I thought, okay, well, there can be that element to it, but I also wanted it to have what I later termed little ‘mind activators’, little moments or bursts of something, that would be like a bird tweeting, but electronically. Those moments wouldn’t be too distracting, but they’d be enough for you to notice them, and for them to activate something in you. I continued that approach on the Room Tones pieces, where as much as there are bits that would sound repetitious, nothing ever really repeats itself. 

It involves using two particular modules on the Buchla. One is a sequencer, the Quad Sequential Voltage Source Model 251e, and the other module I used for this particular patch is called the Source Of Uncertainty Model 266e. I set up a series of notes, on the sequencer, which takes me about half an hour. I can put 49 notes into that, and I can do that four times if I want to, so I can have four channels of those 49 notes. I would choose a scale, a key, and I would put a load of notes in, in that key, into the sequencer, in two channels, and then I use the Source Of Uncertainty module to randomly select those notes. It means that it’s partly random, but it’s also ordered. I have control over the randomness as well, so I can control whether they’re lower notes or higher notes in that scale, so there is some performance aspect to these pieces also. 

I often use the Buchla in my work. I was first inspired to buy one through Alessandro Cortini. I’d known about the Buchla for quite a while, mostly through being a bit of a synth nerd, but I watched a really good video he did ages ago where he was talking about the Buchla. He’s got such an open way of talking about things, a warm and generous sharing nature, and I was so inspired by.that. Unluckily, or luckily, I came into some money, and was able to buy a Buchla system about seven years ago. 

They’re quite expensive, and it’s often quite hard to work out how to use them at first. You approach it with a bit of naiveté, and you don’t know what you’re doing. But that’s when you come up with the best sounds, when you don’t know what you’re doing. Now I know how to use it, I have to really force myself not to fall into certain ways of working, because it’s much more interesting to go the direction where you don’t know whether it’s going to work, or where it’s going, or what’s going to happen. It’s like a toy, and that’s what’s appealing about the Buchla. It looks like a toy; it’s very colourful, with the banana sockets and the different coloured banana cables. They’re very playful instruments, and it’s great because it’s always doing something a little bit different, and I really like that about it too. You can just get lost in it.  

There are two other elements on the Room Tones pieces. There’s some reverb, but there’s also a box I used on the Space No Space album that I released on Golden Ratio Frequencies last year, the Ciat-Lonbarde CocoQuantus. That’s also quite integral to the Room Tones process. It’s like a looping machine but it’s always listening and always repeating; it’s always recording sounds into itself, and it will then repeat them for as long as you want. You can push a button so it will repeat them endlessly, or you can have it so that it will repeat them for maybe ten seconds, or fifteen seconds.

I feed the two channels from the Buchla into the CocoQuantus, and I’m also using some random control voltages to switch the looping on and off. So sometimes it will capture them and repeat them for longer, and sometimes the notes will go in and not repeat. So that’s like another random element that’s adding to these pieces. Sometimes it will play the notes backwards. Sometimes it will skip through a certain part of the loop and do something different. All of that is quite integral to the sort of accidental harmonies that sometimes happen in the Room Tones pieces. It’s got a really nice character to it as well, a strange quite noisy character. It’s a bit of a strange, alien machine. Sometimes a little noise will get into it and it will live in there for a while, looping around, with nowhere to go. 

The Room Tones pieces almost happened in spite of me, if that makes sense. In a way I almost felt guilty releasing them. There was that element of, ‘Have I really made this?’ But then, saying that, the moments that I recorded were some of the moments where I happened to be more involved. Sometimes I might hear it doing something and I’d go, ‘Oh that’s interesting, I’m going to see what’s going on,’ and I would start getting involved. I was always really careful and really conscious about not wanting any changes to be too dramatic. I didn’t want big changes or big timbre changes. I was trying to make something that was slow and spacious and steady, in a way. Sometimes I got it wrong, and I left some of those bits in, even though in other projects I might have decided to edit those out. I just wanted it to exist and do its own thing, and for me not to be too obsessive about it. 

During that period when I was really intensely working and doing the Room Tones pieces, I would go for a walk along the Brighton seafront in the evening, and I would have them playing as I walked. I realised that they were really quite powerful, and I really enjoyed listening to them, partly because they didn’t feel like I’d made them. It wasn’t like I’d spent months tweaking this bit or that bit until I’d driven myself mad – they were like new things that someone else had made that I could enjoy, disconnected from my involvement in them. That was really nice for me.  

Room Tones Purple is released July 16 2020 through Bandcamp.
Simon James photo by Curtis James. Room Tones artwork by Emily Macaulay.

Grab a copy of Volume 2 HERE, NOW!

Following hot off the heals of Volume 1, we are delighted that Volume 2 is now up for pre-order, featuring 24 wonderful artists inc. Time Attendant, Gagarin, Conflux Coldwell, The Revenant Sea and more.

ISOLATION AND REJECTION is a multi-volume compilation of rejected sounds, all for The Brick, a fantastic charity in Wigan.

From small ideas and a little hope come rejection, loss and disappointment.

But we won’t let you down – you are safe here.

Here’s the full track list for Vol 2:

1. Lose a Leg – Thinking About It

2. Gagarin – Studio 54 Revisited

3. Time Attendant – Binocular Visions

4. Caper One & Vandal Deca – Ghostmiles (Tin Cans & Strong Mix)

5. Andrew Haines – Full Moon @ The Shaman’s Oak

6. Audio Obscura – Castles On Earth

7. Conflux Coldwell – Ran Aground Off Thanet

8. Crisp Packet Jackets – Dreadful Own Brand

9. Aged – heinrichwave dot wave

10. Sairie – The House Of The Rising Sun

11. James A. McDermid – Starved Lips in the Gloam

12. Acid Wilhelm – My Aharonov–Bohm Effect

13. The Revenant Sea – No Later

14. Hwyl Nofio – Music For Broken Toy Pianos

15. Sparkling Seagull – Cosmic Furniture

16. Free Magic Show – odwołany lot do Krakowa

17. St James Infirmary – Higging

18. Baron Farg – Sin Mission

19. Drunk Keith! – The Poltergeist Wife!

20. Stu & Rav. – Blahk

21. Pete Warren – Brief Respite

22. Von Heuser – Bring Me The Head Of J.W.

23. Jeffrey Sinibaldi + JS Adams – Axe Marks The Spot

24. Kallie Marie – In The Arms of Overreach

ISOLATION AND REJECTION was born out of thinking about what happened to all the tracks that didn’t make it onto those fancy compilations, and is now turning into an ongoing project to collect, collate and promote rejected sounds. This is not an isolation project – it’s a rejection project.

With over 100 artists signed up, we are going to release five volumes over the next few months. Each volume will showcase those lost gems, discarded and abandoned but now lovingly embraced and put front and centre for your enjoyment. We’ll also be sharing the stories behind the rejection – funny, weird and sometimes a little heart breaking.

Artists contributing to the series include Time Attendant, Howlround, Dolly Dolly, Cahn Ingold Prelog, Alison Cotton, Farmer Glitch, Rupert Lally, Sone Institute, The Declining Winter, TVO, Ekoplekz, Kemper Norton, Boobs of Doom, Grey Frequency, Elizabeth Joan Kelly, Thomas Ragsdale and many many more.

Some you will know and some maybe you won’t.

Volumes 3, 4 and 5 of ISOLATION AND REJECTION will follow shortly.

Manchester-based Scissorgun is a duo of multi-disciplinary electronic artist Dave Clarkson and guitarist / vocalist Alan Hempsall, both stalwarts of the Manchester music scene. Clarkson has divided his recent time between projects like Spectral Bazaar, whose electronic re-imagining of Holst’s Planet Suite produced one of last year’s finest records, and his ongoing processed field recording projects for the Linear Obsessional label. Hempsall was one of the founding members of the legendary post-punk group Crispy Ambulance, part of the early Factory Records roster and a band that were the first local group to own a drum machine.

The pair met in the early 2000s at a gig by Triclops, a trio that Clarkson was then a member of, and promptly hit it off. Their Scissorgun project was named after a 2002 Crispy Ambulance album, released some twenty years after the band originally split up and following their tentative reforming in the late 1990s. Hempsall and Clarkson’s first release was Assault Two, released in 2016, its name again referencing an earlier Crispy Ambulance release (their debut single, 1980’s ‘From The Cradle To The Grave’, had the catalogue reference Assault One). The coded references suggested this was, if not an extension of Hempsall’s band, then certainly inextricably linked.

And so we arrive at this year’s follow-up, the wryly-titled All You Love Is Need. Recorded following a period in which the band toured with Wrangler, you can hear some of that group’s rough electronic edges rubbing off on the eleven songs presented here. ‘Forensic Dub’ and ‘Hybrid Threat’ echo Wrangler’s focus on punishing electronic rhythms fused with a lysergic, mantra-like vocal style, but the Scissorgun sound is arguably more robust, more rocky, less overtly beholden to alien electronics: ‘Hybrid Threat’ features brilliant guitar work from Hempsall, running from a sort of evocative, emotive blues to an angry, distorted nod in the direction of punk, while ‘Forensic Dub’ takes a provocative dubstep bassline and hitches it to textural guitar shapes, an insistent industrial beat and acidic gurgling. “You can hear both of our influences coming through on Scissorgun,” Clarkson explained to me last year. “Alan was a big Throbbing Gristle fan, and I was as well. We bring those influences out on the Scissorgun recordings. It’s a kind of melting pot of all kinds of things.”

Opening track ‘Terminal Velocity (Syncing)’ sets the uncompromising scene for the record, Hempsall delivering the vocal as a hypnotic, cautionary chant over a machine-like groove of heavy bass, fractured synths and howling guitars. The rhythm is key here, sounding like a throwback to the post-punk jazz-funk swing of a group like A Certain Ratio yet carrying a sort of ritualistic, tribal energy. From there we move through tracks like ‘Salvia’, full of dreamy guitar, space-era launchpad samples and a general sense of fragile serenity, like looking upward at an untroubled sky from a terminal beach.

‘Bruise’ is one of the album’s many highlights, wherein the duo throw themselves into a sort of hypnotic, techno-inflected pop, all nagging synths and an unswerving grid of 4/4 beats. Here you find Hempsall delivering a wordless stream of vocal utterances, almost like he’s reading a Hugo Ball sound poem. ‘Dark Routines’ is another standout moment, being a beatific sequence of delicate, semi-ambient electronic passages, while the frantic ‘Pumpkin Face’ has all the force and thrust of an Empirion live industrial techno set from the mid-1990s, its relentless focus on a rolling, urgent bassline acting as the perfect foil for Hempsall’s feisty guitar work.

The long-form closing track ‘Double Agent’ begins with the sound of rushing water, familiar to followers of Clarkson’s work recording in Cornish caves and on the Wirral coast near where he grew up. From there we hear snatches of sinister radio transmissions, an unfolding suite of bass sounds that sound like they belong in an especially tense scene in Stranger Things, a fluttering Morse-code pattern and ominous guitars that sound like Hempsall is playing determinedly at the centre of a pentagram. That the piece eventually coalesces into a sort of ethereal beauty highlights what this duo do best: subverting expectations.

Head swivelling before the rest of it turned, its attention seemed to encompass the whole gallery, which gradually narrowed to a point where I stood. Slowly and elegantly, it crossed the few metres of tiled floor space from the spot where it had been seemingly examining a pillar. Placing feet precisely and with deliberation it arrived where I was frozen, entranced. With my 10-month-old baby in my arms, I considered running, but the newly compressing air and heavy silence around us kept me rooted.

It.

Leaned.

Closer. 

And then left, prancing away with striped dancing ease. Legs capable of too much bend; its steps and strides rubbery, wrong.

That was my encounter with The Squash. A moment I have struggled with since; to recall, describe, and understand. Described by the Tate Britain as a performance art installation, it took residence from March to October in 2018 in London. A ‘performer’ roamed around the central gallery at will, lounging, stretching, touching things, gazing.

But that's not what I saw. That wasn't a costume, it was skin: dimpled, goose-bumped in the air-conditioned space, gently rippling as a result of some internal tension. It's head not a helmet but a smooth inscrutable skull; the surface unbroken and  hypnotic, in the long moment in which I stood before it I could have sworn I saw dead stars drifting in the depths of its blank face, dense shapes moving slowly across an infinite chasm; the hand it extended towards my child crackled with potential, but a potential for what?

What was it?

A social media search has determined The Squash was many things to many people. Where I felt and saw a yawning, engulfing... something, others experienced an erotic charge, humour, indifference, whimsy, or a passing and momentary distraction. There were variations in its appearance too: speckled with gold, mottled and mulched, ruffled, squintingly bright, shadowed; but always with the same frame; that smooth long head and humanoid body.

Requests to speak with the Tate organisation and the artist have been met with diversions, excuses and, finally, legally firm refusals. The Squash's manifestation so near the headquarters of the nation's security agencies suggest it either was not felt by them to be a threat, or that, if it was, it was not to be confronted. Consulting parliamentary records, it seems the state was, in any case, consumed with the legislative manoeuvring of the Brexit process. Unanswered or heavily redacted responses to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act made further interrogation of the government pointless.

Why there, in that place, at that time?

Aside from culture reviews, The Squash was not newsworthy; no concerned commentators worried about its existence or meaning. Birth and death rates remained unremarkable during the time of its wandering around the Tate Britain's halls. Average national and global temperatures continued to rise, but surely climate change was the overwhelming reason there. Data on employment, air pollution, popular baby names, global financial exchanges, food consumption, Tate visitor numbers, falling biodiversity, the rate of expansion of the universe, surveys of favourite colours, and frequency of civil disturbances all stubbornly failed to correlate with the intrusion of The Squash. Consultations with physicists, doctors, architects, historians, tree surgeons, pilots, trade unionists, religious scholars, street-food vendors, violinists did not provide useful context. A psycho-geographical mooch around the surrounding area of Pimlico revealed nothing of value; the tumbling crisp packets, pub signs, graffiti, and street names refused to cohere into anything resembling a message.

What did it want?

Soon after our meeting, there were bumps in walls, undulations with no obvious cause; just one at a time, moving frequently between rooms. There was what looked like a small handprint on the kitchen window, fingers extended downwards. Whispers in the pipes. The front door, a different colour, though my partner insisted it had always been like that. Found in a shoe, a flat pale stone painted with three blue spots. There used to be a lamppost outside; then there was not. My child occasionally clapped a strange syncopated rhythm. My sock-drawer was full of leaves. I felt an itch behind both ears when I thought of clouds. I heard waves at night; I do not live near the sea. My nails… they could smell, I think.

What happened to me?

I think rarely of The Squash these days. Things are as they were before. Typing this, I felt my hair briefly tugged but, spinning round, there was no one there. I will send this off and think no more of it.

Where did it come from?

The Squash seems to have simply occurred. If those of us blessed and cursed with its interactions experienced such vastly different responses, what was The Squash itself; its essential, unelaborated, unmediated self? Was it conjured from our collective lust, fear, political passion, disgust, admiration, boredom? Reflecting at us our own desires and fears?

Or just a creature that briefly considered eating me and my young child?

Where has it gone?

Will it come back?

Swiss-based electronic musician Rupert Lally releases a new album for the Modern Aviation imprint today (12th June 2020). Called Lost To The Past, the release finds him eschewing the soundtrack concepts – both real and imagined – of his recent material and instead finds him taking a personal look over his own life.

To celebrate the release, we spoke to Rupert about his extensive back catalogue and set him the challenging task of picking a mere ten releases. A user’s guide playlist acting as an entry point to Rupert’s material can be found at the end.

Growing Up On Mars (2006)

This was my first release under my own name – The Noisy Image, which was released the year before was originally put out as a promo for a new collaborative project that included my wife and some others. Growing Up On Mars felt like a statement of intent in terms of the music I wanted to make as a solo artist. Ironically, listening back now it feels like the slower tracks like ‘Tape 1’ and ‘Purple America’ have been more indicative, in the long run, of the music I continue to make. Around the time of its release, I joined MySpace on the advice of my friend and guitarist Christian Miller and the feedback and encouragement these tracks received on there, not to mention some airplay on Resonance FM, meant that I felt it was worthwhile continuing to release my own music – if I hadn’t had that favourable response, who knows if I would have persevered or not.

Key tracks: ‘Four Suns’, ‘Tape 1’, ‘Fear Behind The Window’

Threads (2009)

After Growing Up On Mars and its follow up, Feral, I initially struggled to create more music that I was happy with. My wife and I had now bought a house and we’d had our first child, and as well as other commercial music work, that all kept me busy. I junked an entire EP midway through 2008, because I wasn’t happy with it, and the only thing I kept was the track ‘Disco Volanté’. In the end, I began cutting up tracks that I’d done and added samples from old IBM adverts or public information service records and suddenly the project had momentum. I’d said that I’d wanted Feral to be like a musical patchwork quilt, and this was that idea taken to its extreme. It’s like the music equivalent of Peter Blake’s Sgt Pepper cover to me.

I genuinely believed that listeners would make the connection between stuff like ‘Inspector ‘71’ and tracks on previous albums such as ‘Four Suns’ or ‘Lost In My Room’ – they didn’t, and the album’s failure was not only painful for me, but it also forced me to re-think how I approached my releases in future. In some ways it’s a very personal album – it’s about nostalgia but also about growing up and being a parent. It’s no coincidence that the album ends with HAL from 2001 singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’, because that’s what I used to sing to my son when he was very little.

Key tracks: ‘Ode To The Hippie’, ‘Vermont Dropout’, ‘Last Words’

Theatre Of Noise (2011)

I ended up releasing three albums in 2011 – something that now seems pretty normal in the context of my current output – and this one, filled with more experimental tracks than I would normally have released back then, was the least planned of the three. Theatre Of Noise was mostly created during a period of forced convalescence after a minor case of blood poisoning. It featured me experimenting with various plugins, often creating the tracks almost in real time. As such it anticipates my work with Espen and my subsequent albums created with the modular synthesiser. To my great surprise, it garnered a lot of attention after being featured on Synthtopia and was, for a while, my most downloaded release.

Key tracks: ‘A Quiet History’, ‘a Collection Of Masks’, ‘A Distant Episode’

Stillium Partita (with Espen J. Jörgensen) (2012)

My first release with Espen came about after I did a remix of an unreleased track from his and Simon Fisher Turner’s Soundescapes. Espen asked if I wanted to try collaborating on something with him. We had no idea how well it would work, so we set ourselves a fixed timeframe (two or three months, is my recollection) and then we’d see whether we had anything worth releasing at the end of that. To say it went better than expected is an understatement: before the time was up we had over thirty tracks, the best of which (or so we thought) ended up on this, our debut album. Others would appear later on Reworked, Greece @ Peace, Noisence and This Is Art. I remember this initial period of collaboration as being one of the most enjoyable of my entire career and it was lovely to have someone who would not only share the burden of promoting the finished product but who encouraged me to be more daring in my own work.

Key tracks: ‘Skallax’, ‘The Basement Upstairs’, ‘Hornjiel’

This Is Art (with Espen J Jörgensen) (2013)

After six releases within a year and a worry that other musical commitments would give me less time, I asked Espen if we could make our seventh release our last, at least for the time being. It was understood from the beginning that we could well do more stuff together but if that proved not to be the case I wanted the partnership to end on a high note. This album collected stuff from around the time of Stillium Partita, tracks that had begun as remixes of File Under ‘Guitar’ material, backing tracks from an abortive solo album of mine and newer work.

It wasn’t put together as easily as some of our previous work so I’m pleased that what emerged has such a coherent feel. I’m also really proud of my guitar work on this album, especially the solos on tracks such as Wiki Lies and Where Do You Go. I’d been very reticent about using guitar so prominently. In my previous work it was often heavily edited or buried under processing, but Espen had encouraged me to include it more and more in our work, and this album highlights how much my confidence in my own playing had grown in that time.

Key tracks: ‘This Is Art’, ‘Wiki Lies’, ‘Pistolero Rides Again’

Scenes From A High Rise (2015)

The end of 2013 had left me exhausted and in poor health, and 2014 proved to even worse as I was faced with my father’s rapidly-declining health and subsequent death. As such, it would take until early 2015 before I really felt creatively ‘myself’, once more. This album was created in one week and almost entirely done live with a Eurorack modular synthesiser. It pointed toward a different way of working, more or less in real time, that I enjoyed immensely. It opened my music up to new listeners as I rapidly became part of the ever growing group of modular synthesiser musicians, leading to further releases and my playing live at events such as the Brighton Modular Meet.

Within the modular synth scene, I found a lovely group of performers and manufacturers that genuinely cared about the work we were all doing and a wonderfully inclusive sense of community. The album would also introduce me to future friends and important collaborators such as Hannes Pasqualini and Marc Weidenbaum, whose online Disquiet community would shape my future work. I didn’t realise at the time that the idea of soundtracks to books would be a concept to which I’d return to a great deal, and it started with this soundtrack to J.G. Ballard’s High Rise. Ballard’s work, with its combination of the alien and familiar (as well as a willingness to subvert the idea of how a novel could be constructed or read), had been immensely important to me as both a reader and writer. I first discovered his books in about 1996, around the time Cronenberg released his adaptation of Crash.

Key tracks: ‘Critical Mass’, ‘The Blood Garden’, ‘Night Moves’

Solid State Memories (2018)

I’d loved my friend Hannes Pasqualini’s artwork for some time and I always promised myself that one day I’d hire him to create an album cover for me. In a lovely surprise, he said he’d gift me an album cover design for my 40th birthday, which was wonderful but I knew it would mean I’d have to do something really special in order to do justice to his beautiful art. I’d been gradually doing more writing again since my father’s death – a film blog, keeping a diary – in an attempt to fulfil some of the potential I’d felt I’d had as a teenager and in my twenties. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to put that to the test.

Knowing that I could at least create a short story, if not something even longer, I took an existing idea that I’d had a decade before and added some information that I’d learnt from watching a documentary about human memory. I combined that into a sci-fi story set in the near future which had more than a few nods to Ballard and Philip K. Dick. Once the novella was finished I approached the soundtrack in exactly the same way as I would create the soundtrack to someone else’s work – slowly working through the text looking for moments and motifs I could accompany sonically. This remains one of my proudest achievements, not only for the music but also because I felt I’d finally shown the world what I could do as a writer.

Key tracks: ‘ID & Travel Pass’, ‘At A Party (Years Ago)’, ‘Elevator Shaft’

The Day Of The Triffids (2019)

Fellow Disquiet contributor Ian K Joyce told me about the Bibliotapes label where the concept was to create soundtracks to classic books. This was the idea of Stuart McClean, who I’d known slightly from Espen and I sending tracks in for all the Dark Outside broadcasts. It was a project tailor-made for me and, after some discussion about which book I might do, I settled on the John Wyndham classic, The Day Of The Triffids. The recording was almost as quick as that of High Rise, and the whole soundtrack was completed in one and a half weeks. I would re-read a chapter and then score it straight afterwards. I felt like I was able to really immerse myself in the world of the book and its 1950s / 1960s setting, and it seemed only fitting that the music reflect that BBC Radiophonic Workshop / Tristram Cary / Peter Zinovieff style of early experimental British electronica.

Key tracks: ‘The Coming Of The Triffids’, ‘The Groping City’, ‘Strategic Withdrawal’

The Prospect (2019)

The success of the Triffids soundtrack created a lot of opportunities for me and I was suddenly part of the whole independent cassette label family of musicians and composers. A mixtape I’d created for the music blog Concrete Islands was praised on Twitter by Gavin, who runs Spun Out Of Control. I immediately got in touch, told him how much I loved his label and its beautiful covers designed by Eric Adrian Lee, and asked if he would be interested in letting me create an album for the label.

Remembering an old story idea about a robbery gone wrong, I pitched him the idea of something that mixed High Plains Drifter and The Wicker Man as if scored by John Carpenter and Haxan Cloak. Despite my apparent confidence I was actually extremely nervous making this record, worried that it sounded too different from the rest of Spun Out’s catalog and that I was blowing my one chance with a label I really liked. It was fine though and it was an incredibly exciting moment to see my album up there on the website with Eric’s beautiful artwork.

Key tracks: ‘Edge Of The Union’, ‘Mountains’, ‘No Prospect’

Lost To The Past (2020)

Will Salmon had mentioned on Twitter how much he’d loved my Dune soundtrack. Much like with Spun Out Of Control, I’d then gotten in touch to say how much I’d enjoyed Modern Aviation’s previous releases and whether he’d consider letting me create something for the label. He was immediately enthusiastic, especially after getting my track for the Par Avion compilation, and when he heard my idea of creating an album that was ‘fragments of sonic autobiography’ about places and people that no longer exist. Once I’d created a list for myself of the places and moments from my early life that I wanted to revisit sonically, I approached the recording in much the same way as I had with the book soundtracks: allowing the visual idea or memory fill my mind and then scoring that as if it was a film playing in my head.

Key tracks: ‘A Beautiful View Of The Concrete’, ‘What We Found In The Woods’, ‘Memories Of The Shipwreck’

Lost To The Past by Rupert Lally is released on June 12 2020 by Modern Aviation.