Stasis by Pye Corner Audio

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the work of Pye Corner Audio comes from the meeting of multiple minds, perhaps the result of an expansive array of accomplished artists, congregating in some abandoned church in the English countryside once or twice a week and hitting play on their various electrical music boxes until they strike gold. So vast is the extent to which Martin Jenkins has developed his project and its various sub-narratives, he does more than tap into the ‘hauntology’ Simon Reynolds once wrote about as the latest in musical phenomena – he actively contributed towards the terms inception. Self-releasing Black Mill Tapes part 1 and 2, and then following them up with 2012’s Sleep Games album for Ghost Box, Jenkins set the precedent for the contemporary sonic counterparts of pastoral folk, radiophonic workshop weirdness, quintessentially English horror films and other such odd cultural artefacts he would go on to make (or indeed, be written about as making). On this new LP Stasis we are treated to fourteen tracks that range from plodding, gloomy industrial rhythm tracks to downtempo experiments such as ‘Ways Regained’, which to our ears draw upon those curious b-side cuts that would appear on the Grain 12”s FatCat released back in the late 90s. There is an amalgamation of styles and reference points going on in Stasis but it’s all very much indebted to a certain something that ties them all together, the crux of which is probably just an inherent curiosity with the slightly off the beaten track English eccentricity that lurks just beneath the surface of our own cultural history. ℗ 2016 Ghost Box