Photographic Memory is essentially the city chopped fine until it stops sounding like a city and starts sounding like weather. It’s made to be heard as a continuous mix, but Speake wants you to feel free to dip in and out.
Speake wants you to feel free to dip in and out
Speake makes handmade electronic music from London field recordings, home-built instruments, and charity-shop vinyl. Photographic Memory is essentially the city chopped fine until it stops sounding like a city and starts sounding like weather. It’s made to be heard as a continuous mix, but Speake wants you to feel free to dip in and out.
The terms eidetic memory and photographic memory are often used interchangeably, a photographic memory refers to the ability to recall images, text, or objects in extreme detail with high precision after seeing them only once. Vivid mental imagery somehow impacts people’s ability for “mental time travel,” or the ability to remember past events as well as imagine future events. It is said that extensive research has failed to demonstrate consistent correlations between the presence of eidetic imagery and any cognitive, intellectual, neurological, or emotional measure. Perhaps we have developed an ability to organize certain types of information, rather than possessing an innate total recall or eidetic ability.
Listen up, see what you think. “I mark but the hours of sunshine” (6:49) opens, and first something is happening in a big empty wet room, a strange munchy beat emerges, not exactly hypnotic but it does repeat in a seductive mind altering way. The liberating percussion takes away any negativity, the core stays while constantly new bits appear to add variety and sunshine, now we are building a groove.
Searchlights claw the dark circle of ancient ruins ::
I would like to eat sheets of rice noodles right now, stuffed with various essences, known as Cheung Fun, so smooth, slippery, soft and chewy. “No cheung fun after 5pm” (3:19) starts with a renegade commando beat, and soon the whole band moves in, bringing a blend of percussion, keyboards, odd strange sounds that repeat, a skeletal electronic clock, rumblings, and some surprise bottle play moments. “Have you ever been on a boat when you couldn’t see the land?” (5:36) Starts with ticking. Perhaps we are standing near the engine when crossing the Pacific ocean on a new kind of liner, listening to the shoveling of coal and soon a constant very steady machine is running with odd flickers of voices or phantoms. When the flow takes it down to the skeleton, soon the percussion brings it up again. Are we rowing now? Bonny hand knocks create the beat, at times someone is tossing coins or seeds or pebbles, and the machine is always running, until the arrival.
This time, the motor starts right away and so we head out, “A pregnant pause” (1:40) flows along and then abruptly everything changes. “When did you stop dancing?” (8:54) enters with simulated sizzling hand tapped percussion and some electronic sparks and flares. I remember the sound made when the stylus gets to the end of the record, the vinyl windoff sound goes on and on with a hint of high hat that keeps the forward motion spicy and strong. This is followed by a title that sounds uncomfortable, “Pushing on the bit that hurts” (4:54). When the track starts, things are dark, until the sizzle walks up and away we go. The wind blows over desolate ruins and searchlights claw the dark circle of ancient ruins. I imagine riding a bike carefully down a very steep and long rocky mountain ridge at night.
Sometimes the dripping sounds electronic. The crickets are playing with dry bones, tapping out musical messages, “Passing moustaches through the fence” (4:30), the piano makes this very different from what has come so far. There are Martians imitating dripping water in the cave, soon the percussion gallops along, clanking and reeling. I think there is something in the distance, we are within the machine and in the background is some more music, maybe a circus or a radio saloon. Here the piano never gets to the front and center, the clicks own us, and the crickets with those tapping bones.
The final track, “Photographic Memory” (31:45), in fact is also the title track, and it turns out to be the whole album reprised as one long piece. The segues are invisible.
Photographic Memory is available on Bandcamp.
