Trusted Farms retains something of that freedom. It carries it into music that feels more physical, driven by rhythm, repetition and synthesizers with weight, friction and substance. Many parts were played live and barely edited. Lines are doubled, distorted, recorded again, sent through other machines. They remain recognizable. They keep some of their roughness. They breathe. Perhaps this is where the most beautiful part of the album lies.
Like a light left on in an empty room when everyone has gone
Charlie May’s name has inhabited British electronic music for more than thirty years, sometimes printed on the cover, more often hidden among the credits. He is one of those musicians whose importance can also be measured through other people’s records. With Duncan Forbes he formed Spooky, whose 1993 album Gargantuan belongs to the history of British progressive house, from a time when that definition still described an open, shifting territory, full of possibilities. Found Sound, Open and, this very year, Lucent followed. In between lies an enormous body of music, studio work, remixes, programming, keyboards and live performances.
And then there is Sasha.
You only need to go back to Xpander to understand how decisive May’s contribution was. The seed of that track had already existed as Spooky material, surviving for years on a DAT tape. Sasha heard it, sensed what it could become, and together they took it somewhere else. From that relationship came a long collaboration and an important part of the electronic language that developed between the end of the 1990s and the following decade. Airdrawndagger, Involver, Invol2ver, Scorchio. Music that entered the imagination of a generation while May continued to work with the peculiar discretion of someone who knows the value of a note before the value of his own name.
Years later, Sasha would acknowledge just how much Charlie May had taught him in the studio. That helps place Trusted Farms in the right perspective. It is not the late record of someone trying to remember who he once was. It is the work of a musician who has spent a lifetime inside sound and who, having arrived here, seems interested above all in discovering how little he still needs to make it move.
Seven tracks: “Neck and Neck,” “Lenticular,” “Just Nerves,” “Never Alone,” “Regulator,” “Copper Beech,” “Machinations.” Charlie May writes and produces them entirely himself. A Strangely Isolated Place feels like the perfect home for them, partly because of May’s recent history with the label through Quiet Places, the project with Dennis White and Dave Gardner born from improvisations without beats or grids.
Focused on the exact moment when to stop ::
Trusted Farms retains something of that freedom. It carries it into music that feels more physical, driven by rhythm, repetition and synthesizers with weight, friction and substance. Many parts were played live and barely edited. Lines are doubled, distorted, recorded again, sent through other machines. They remain recognizable. They keep some of their roughness. They breathe. Perhaps this is where the most beautiful part of the album lies.
May has spent decades learning what to add to a track. On Trusted Farms, he seems focused on the exact moment when to stop.
“It is not nostalgia, because the past is never reconstructed. It resembles instead the physical memory of someone who has played for so long that he no longer needs to think about every gesture. The hands arrive first. They know the distance between two notes, they know how long a repetition can live, they recognize when a machine is producing something that would be pointless to make more perfect.” ~Mirco Salvadori
A small melodic phrase can be enough. It returns, shifts its place in perception, slowly acquires meaning. A repeated sequence ceases to be a sequence and becomes an environment. The sound is never polished to the point of losing its origin. It remains slightly rough, sometimes worn, alive. Within these tracks you can feel the hand of someone who knows machines intimately and no longer feels any need to prove it.
It is a rare quality, because contemporary electronic production allows almost everything to be altered. Every detail can be corrected, multiplied, synchronized, cleaned. Charlie May often chooses to leave things where they have found their form. The result has a strange naturalness. The elements seem to have enough space to exist without that space immediately being filled by something else.
Melody also takes on a particular role. May has always had it in his hands. It was already evident in Spooky and became immense in his collaborations with Sasha. Here it is brought back to a more intimate scale. A handful of notes can suddenly open up an enormous depth. They do not demand attention by force. They remain.
Trusted Farms lives precisely through persistence ::
The title itself seems to belong to a place that is both real and imagined. Something familiar, dependable, perhaps old, crossed by machines that continue to work. The sound also possesses this strange rural quality without ever becoming pastoral: wood, circuits, surfaces, air around objects. Electronic music that does not float in infinite space, because it seems to have a floor, walls, a temperature.
The path of the past few years helps explain how May arrived here. Quiet Places allowed him to work outside the grid, letting improvisation determine the form. His more recent solo releases, from Aeon / Dark Matter to Objekt / Neophyte and Capsule, kept that laboratory open. Trusted Farms gathers those experiences and makes them feel like part of a language May had already been speaking a very long time ago, only now with fewer words. For this reason, the album has no need to present itself as a celebratory return. Charlie May never truly disappeared. He remained in records, studios, concerts and collaborations, behind sequences that became enormous without his name necessarily becoming equally enormous.
Now he remains alone. And this solitude suits him.
Towards the end of Trusted Farms, a feeling begins to surface that is difficult to name. It is not nostalgia, because the past is never reconstructed. It resembles instead the physical memory of someone who has played for so long that he no longer needs to think about every gesture. The hands arrive first. They know the distance between two notes, they know how long a repetition can live, they recognize when a machine is producing something that would be pointless to make more perfect.
Electronic music has always had a complicated relationship with time. Machines grow old, formats disappear, clubs close, definitions become narrow. A melody can pass through all of this almost without noticing. Charlie May has known that for a long time. Perhaps Trusted Farms is really about this: leaving enough space for something small to endure. Then come the final machines, the final impulses, a few notes still glowing. There is no need to close the circle. No need to explain where they are leading. They remain there. Like a light left on in an empty room when everyone has gone.
Trusted Farms is available on A Strangely Isolated Place. [Bandcamp]
