Dirty Stream

Two recent and delightfully disjointed works from Martin Jenkins, first in his The House In The Woods guise, the second as Pye Corner Audio. Where Path Becomes The Stream is a seven minute exercise in suspense, dark, murky synths and sampled woodland sounds, building slowly and uneasily. On headphones it's the quite the experience, especially if out walking. Get it at Bandcamp. 

Pye Corner Audio's latest release Dirty Window Of Opportunity is more direct and more obviously dance music, riding in quickly on drums and crashing 808 hi- hats, a bouncing bassline and rippling synths. When the acid line begins bleeping away it's all very exhilarating, enough to take one's breath away under the right circumstances. It's a pay what you want at Bandcamp deal, as per usual. 

Queue them up to play one into the other and they can form two halves of a whole, one pastoral but uneasy, the other urban and plugged in. Like this... 

Where Path Becomes The Stream/ Dirty Window Of Opportunity

Monday's Long Song

Martin Jenkins has been a regular postee at this blog over the last couple of years in his guise as Pye Corner Audio, his battery of synths responsible for some beautiful work on his own and as a remixer (not least the six Pye Corner remixes of the songs from Andy Bell's solo album of last year, a technicoloured, cosmische re-imagining of the songs). Now Martin has another alias, The House In The Woods, and a new album, The Spectral Corridor. The eight tracks contained within are all long songs, the shortest just under eight minutes and the longest coming in at ten minutes seventeen seconds. On The House In The Woods Bandcamp page The Spectral Corridor is described as 'a doom infused set of stygian sludge drone that calls to mind the faded hinterlands of early electronic music infused with modern menace' and if that doesn't set your pulse racing I don't know what will. The tracks on The Spectral Corridor are built around repetition and throbbing, sinister synth tones, and are not for the faint hearted, the opposite of chilled out ambient. It is like the soundtrack to a dystopian 70s sci fi/ horror programme shown late at night on BBC2 or those public information films where children die on pylons or in slurry pits on farmyards. It's beautifully done and has a refusal to go anywhere quickly, but lets the listener sink into the sounds and wallow in the murk. 

Spectral Corridor Part 3 is a menacing, slowly building nightmare which keeps on building, the humming noises increasing as a ghostly topline wavers in and out. It is quite possible it will freak your shit out. 

Quadratic is slightly less threatening, content to merely unsettle the listener, the sound of Tangerine Dream having a bad trip. You can listen to the whole album and buy it at Bandcamp.