Monic: Trawler Tapes LP

Simon Shreeve’s doomiest moniker Mønic follows those killer Burial and Regis reworks from a few years back and adds to his Downwards stripes with a necessary vinyl edition packing both volumes of his recent ‘Trawler Tapes' series originally issued digitally with his Osiris Music UK label, highly recommended to disciples of Kevin Drumm’s ‘Imperial Distortion’, The Conet Project, Thomas Köner or SAW II. Made on the English south coast and first issued into the strange high summer of 2020 lockdown, the ‘Trawler Tapes’ depicts Mønic more strung out and glowering than we’ve ever heard. In its unfathomably deep sunk, reverberating drones and keeling atmospheric pressure, it’s truly a musick that evokes a sense of absence, even tragedy and loss, drawing upon various aspects of dark ambient isolationism and thru to more sublime, meditative zones for a sort of dissociative expression of soul that lives up to comparisons with modern greats, from Thomas Köner to Kevin Drumm. Where much of Shreeve’s work since D&B/dubstep unit Kryptic Minds thru to his CUB collabs with Regis have been concerned with physicality, his Mønic project inverts that urge for a musick ov liminality. However there’s a fine connection between those polls in Mønic’s use of the full frequency spectrum here, from deeply layered subs to its fine-grained high register timbres, with cavernous space in between. In both volume 1’s ‘H-NET’ set and volume 2’s ’T-NET’ parts, he oscillates a suggestive shadowplay, drifting from Davey Jones’ locker tones to more static, indoor subtleties redolent of Kevin Drumm’s ‘Imperial Distortion’ classic, and thru to midwinter tundra scapes and what feels like lingering Lynchian afterimages, ultimately shoring up with scant glimpses of percussion in ’T-NET 4’, A must for the darkside dwellers.