Pye Corner Audio: The Spiral 10"

Martin Jenkins (The Head Technician) reprises the Black Mill Tapes sound as Pye Corner Audio with the haunting, impending drama of The Spiral for those arch horror score fiends at Death Waltz Originals. Purely analog in nature and thusly porous or prone to ghostly infidelities, The Spiral finds PCA at his succinct and economical best, coaxing out supple, rolling basslines and filigree sylvan hooks from his mass of semi-organic gear, and treating the studio like an imaginative organ from which he teases out its most fleeting, invasive thoughts and nostalgic cues. The results are as gripping as anything from the Black Mill Tapes which earned him legion followers at the start of this decade, but also now pack more detailed, adroit twists and turns into their cadaverous silhouettes in a way that will light up the pleasure centres of even the most picky synth/soundtrack pedants. A-side sports the carmine velvet-clad kerb crawler, Do You Hear Them for the sleaziest basements and darkrooms of the mind, alongside two achingly well realised vignettes or cues in the warbly flux of Wake Up and the pulsating night-flight It May Not Be Real. B-side, he flips that structure to the other side of the mirror, resulting the whirligig hard-step of the EP’s title track - imagine Powell and Not Waving doing a Giallo OST - before unfurling the lustrous black ribbon of Descent and the tangibly tense but barely-there ambience of It Is Real.