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Richard Youngs and Andrew Paine, "Roman Concrete: Volume 1"
This isn't exactly what I would expect from this pairing given past collaborations, but this disassociated mix of electronic garble, dissipated guitar, and severed spoken word opens up yet another interesting starting point for Paine and Youngs to explore.
Touching on the kind of cleaned-up post industrial space that no one has really divined yet, these tracks sing back to the time when reel-to-reels opened up minds to ways forward. That era's undeveloped and burgeoning sense of investigation is rebirthed here (without the tape technology), leaving plenty of space for intrepretive input to play a part.
With snatches of spoken word seemingly taken from larger scattered diaries/narratives, different pieces of emphasis placed on different elements giving weight to multiple interpretations. The 'Dover, Calais' lyric of "Caught in Traffic" combined with a tolling bell has the open water ache of a watery journey, despite there being little, if actually anything, to support this. This cut-up prose works in several ways across this volume of Roman Concrete, some of this harking back to the early vocal experiments of Richard Youngs, chopped for source material and lowered into a local well for recording. There is the menace in the echoic lost voices of overheard hallway conversations and the broken snatches of UFO narrative of tracks like "Touchdown in Rochdale." This speaks of secrecy and hidden diaries. The music used throughout is built from a menagerie of friendless sounds: a harsh edged abandoned bed of sci-fi bleeps, squandered searchlight guitar, and electronic trivialities.
Coiling tapes and shortwave shudders are interleaved through the record, footage from blue ambient motion pictures generating a jagged soundtrack. With all this unconnected energy bouncing around it is a real curve ball when "British Train Journey" arrives. It is the most structured piece here, having a kind of simple stylophone / travelling Kraftwerk mood that touches on the squelch of the electronica that bridged the electronic ages.
