Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan :: The Nation’s Most Central Location (Castles in Space)

Overall, a wistful reflection on the past inside the present, seen through hometown glass darkly; a critique of its place in the nation ‘inspired’ by the architecture and history of the eponymous New Town he grew up in.

A musical analog in tangerine (dream) sequences

Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan further pursues his studies in musical psychogeography, as previously seen on Districts, Roads, Open Space, exploring Britain’s North-South divide and the empty promises of regional urban development. It finds a musical analog in tangerine (dream) sequences of post-industrial ambient synth noodles (cf. the ‘un-song’ sides of Low and Heroes) on The Nation’s Most Central Location, as Gordon Chapman-Fox sets the brutalist years of (largely) Conservative rule and neo-liberalist hegemony to a soundtrack of retro-futurist synthesis infused with documentary spoken word captures.

Running through it feels like an undercurrent of anger looked back in—see the bitter irony of “London’s Moving Our Way” and “A Brighter And More Prosperous Future,” the N-S divide documented with an eye to five decades of ‘leveling up’ (not!) through the prism of his signature mix of forlorn hope and doleful optimism. Recalling childhood as a time when the future beckoned with excitement, rather than the angst of adulthood, Chapman-Fox yearns to return to times of future-based optimism, nostalgia tinged with ambivalence, the will-to-return to a bright future view up against today’s darker optics. At its heart lie lost futures, inert potential, as on the likes of “Busway,” a bitter-sweet vignette that manages to wring emotion from a road feature—an ode to Runcorn’s unique bus route (connecting all communities, free from other traffic) with a symbolic caché of wasted potential to improve quality of lives. “Thelwall Viaduct”—after a much-loved/hated landmark on the M6, barely possessed of the cultural resonance to inspire a weekend driver, let alone a composer—finds him boldly going where none has gone before. A tone is set of largely cold concrete peopled by tired but still hopeful denizens, imbued with an elegiac tenor, plangent but hollow melancholy, as if of hauntology it had drunk, lamenting a half-life, albeit sardonically alluded to, with no small freight of feeling–a mood that intoxicates once drunk deeply of, the bitter irony of the closing “A Brighter and More Prosperous Future” still resonating beyond its last strains.

Overall, a wistful reflection on the past inside the present, seen through hometown glass darkly; a critique of its place in the nation ‘inspired’ by the architecture and history of the eponymous New Town he grew up in. One for fanciers of Dalham, Clocolan and other CIS curations.

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Music and design by Gordon Chapman-Fox
Mastered by Antony Ryan at RedRedPaw
Original artist photo by Richard Lea-Hair

The Nation’s Most Central Location is available on Castles in Space [Bandcamp]