All in all, the travel and topography template audio-visually mediated across its catalog by Fluid Audio curator, Dan Crossley, gets an interesting refresh, as Broken Memory Machine presses ambient landscape into service of a kind of reverse hauntology seemingly towards effecting a slow memory purge—of place and emotion.
These days encounter with the metaphorical journey risks turning one man’s transformative experience into another’s hackneyed turn-off. But when it’s ‘real,’ as Phil Tomsett keeps it, privileging programme over figurative flim flam, it has undeniable imaginative heft. On Where The Light Stops (Time Released Sound, 2013), as The Inventors of Aircraft, he tapped into train travel, and ‘the atmospheres of old abandoned train stations in remote parts of England’ to evoke a sepia-tone picture of derelict stations and their attendant relics; No Answers, Not Even Any Questions (Hibernate, 2015) (review here) explored the ambivalence of a move to the country, the Romantic artistic conceit of nature as source of answers challenged with a rural brutalism at odds with the mythical pastoral idyll. On Broken Memory Machine the journey and its geography become a site for reflection on times a-changing and unchanging, a setting shaping story and its performance, an audio-narrative drawn out around a loose theme of circumstance, of loss of family and home, enacted through shifting landscapes via synthetic timbres and spindly drones.
Self-described as ‘probably my most realised album to date and a slight shift from previous work,’ you’d still be looking to ‘file under ambient’ (experimental / modern classical / home listening / etc.), alongside The Inventors of Aircraft, though Broken Memory Machine comes out under his own name. Perhaps it’s to signal Tomsett’s eschewal of unity of tone or tenor, here a faux-naif romanticism with snatches of melodic string passages, there oblique, minimal, uningratiating of aspect: ‘between someone like A Winged Victory for the Sullen and someone heavier such as The Haxan Cloak,’ (says Phil). His Memory Machine generates a road trip over a broken Britain, an odd mix of rural and military—abandoned farm machinery and lost wandering livestock, half-buried armoured vehicles and hill-skirting jet fighters. The imagined subjects negotiate the South West wilds—Exmoor, Dartmoor, familiar sites of childhood recall–as they seek sanctuary from the darkened memories of bygone times. These perimeters, though, are barely musically described, still less ‘romantically’ rendered, as the artist seeks not so much to commemorate as to virtually obliviate with a largely stultifying sound blanket seeming set to stifle harmonic modulation. But for the arcing sounds in “The Long Quiet Highway” and “Morning Happiness,” the stately elevations of “Gunmetal Skies” and “Wandering And Livestock,” the keynote is absence; right from the initial “She’s Gone” to the static void of “The Hole Dug This Myself;” and even when assuming a purer form (“Broken Memory Machine”), a nebulous aspect (“Chasing Cloud Shadows”) prevails, finding full outlet in the echoing dark-ambient finale of “Parentless.”
All in all, the travel and topography template audio-visually mediated across its catalog by Fluid Audio curator, Dan Crossley, gets an interesting refresh, as Broken Memory Machine presses ambient landscape into service of a kind of reverse hauntology seemingly towards effecting a slow memory purge—of place and emotion. It’s mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri (Black Knoll Studios) with a sound savvy lending resonance to the final architecture of sound, and documented by Colette Saint Yves with exquisite ltd ed. photo prints.
Broken Memory Machine is available on Fluid Audio. [Bandcamp]
