Fresh from his music being picked up for a Ridley Scott Netflix production, Dalham brings the required noise in Cobra / And The Sun, a twin release from the estimable Castles in Space set to alter states across the planet.
Set to alter states across the planet
Fresh from his music being picked up for a Ridley Scott Netflix production, Dalham brings the required noise in Cobra / And The Sun, a twin release from the estimable Castles in Space set to alter states across the planet.
Cobra’s setting is an abandoned government facility for weapons testing and experiments with radar located on a remote gravelly spit of land on England’s east coast. In the mid-60s it saw construction of an over-the-horizon radar, a technological marvel bouncing signals off the ionosphere, built to covertly monitor the activities of other nations. Apparently ‘the reflectivity of the ionosphere is a function of frequency, time of day, time of year and of the solar cycle,’ so essentially ‘a sympathy for the celestial was required to fully exploit this man made construction.’ Alas, plagued by noise creating false returns on the monitors, it never achieved intended performance, despite several investigations being shut down and finally dismantled in the early 70s. Now long dormant, Cobra is a nature reserve, fit to inspire the likes of Dalham ‘whose mix of sci-fi and blue-skied synth is sure to win hearts and minds of Boards and Ghost Box buffs alike.’ (Waves igloo-‘view), purveying well-Carpentered 70s analog-jam (cf. BoC’s Tomorrow’s Harvest) with a voice more sui generis than the average igloo-‘viewed BoC-clone (cf. Faex Optim, PBS’73).
And the Sun‘s turns to our bastard spawn, AI, looking at how a nascent consciousness might see faith, love, morality and so on; will it be ‘capable of understanding its creators who often hold logic and superstition within themselves? In return how will humans comprehend its hallucinations?’ That title…? So, while we ponder, ‘a ball of hot plasma oblivious to our existence continually burns hydrogen until it runs out and swallows its three closest neighbours.’ Dystopia a go-go. Expect from the artist known to his Mum as Jon Michelaides the customary retro-futurist Kosmische downtempo brew cited early on as ‘a variant of woozy tape-saturated electronica that’s at once caustic and caressing, it boldly blurs signifiers of new brutalism and beautiful places‘ (Waves igloo-‘view).
Cobra / And The Sun is available on Castles in Space. [Bandcamp]
