Field Lines Cartographer :: Portable Reality Generator (DiN)

The modular maven channels something of an early TD sound-feel via post-Kosmische textures, motifs, and rhythms; new projections in the head cinema, strangely familiar, yet otherworldly.

Harmony and timbre fusing

“I’ve always loved how music creates new worlds—imaginary environments you can live in. As a listener you become immersed in a new reality for the duration of an album. Fully enveloped by textures, melodies, harmonies and rhythms, new pictures appear in the minds-eye, new dreams… strange & beautiful landscapes sketched in sound. An alternate, portable reality.” Thus spake Mark Burford of his Portable Reality Generator.

The Lancastrian synth savant’s latest Field Lines Cartographer release is curated by Ian Boddy‘s DiN, which strikes as felicitous in association with the 25th anniversary of a label that from its inception has been a platform for bringing the spirit of old school electronic pioneers to a table laden with more contemporary experimental (post-)digital fare. FLC is known for this old-new synthesis, through his live performances, but mostly from a series of releases on Castles In Space (see igloo ’views of Dreamtides (2022), This Vibrating Earth (2023), Phases of This and Other Moons (2024)), Quiet Details (’view of Tone Maps) and Woodford Halse (WF 65 – Superclusters), as well as DiN’s own Tone Science sub-label (see esp. last year’s Tone Science Module No​​​.​​​8 Tone Science Live), and whether you respond to “shimmering unsettling noodles” (The Wire) or are more open to “the sound of big, strange worlds” (Electronic Sound Magazine), you can’t but be impressed.

The modular maven channels something of an early TD sound-feel via post-Kosmische textures, motifs, and rhythms; new projections in the head cinema, strangely familiar, yet otherworldly, from the opening “The Sun in Splendour” and “Scattered Light” forming a gently percolating prelude to usher you in. “Collapsable Mantra,” starts the main event, building exponentially, bringing new skin to the old ceremony of Berlin School sequencing rising to a quasi-climactic edge before relenting and fading. “Fog Warning” follows a similar dynamic of slow build with chord swells and tense strings, but still held back in not-quite release before ceding to the last track in this centerpiece, “Ascending Waves of Consciousness,” which rolls along on a kind of drumless motorik, with time and space afforded for it to unfold, harmony and timbre fusing before the whole reaches resolution on the shimmering finale of “Interference Patterns.”

Portable Reality Generator, then, is a work of widescreen vision dealing in imaginary landscapes sonicized into variegated recursions sculpted in prettily pastoral to darkly doleful tonalities. FLC’s stature as a musical world-builder is further enhanced by a release that’s sure to allure new admirers from early Tangerine Dream-ers and Berlin School alumni to later Castles In Space-cadets.

Portable Reality Generator is available on DiN [Bandcamp]