SciFiSol: Experimental Drawingboard

The title track of SciFiSol’s Experimental Drawingboard is so inventive – at long last – that I immediately began googling the creator and trying to find out when they’d be coming through for a gig.

Take the big, empty and spacious production style of Martin Hannett and unchain him from having to craft his mad FX masterpieces into “songs” and you have it. “Hannett’s Lift Recording” from Joy Division’s “Insight” finds a modern analogue here with a single repetitive machine that opens and closes – a metal hammer hammering metal. Before too long SciFiSol’s attention wanders to what new rhythms can be made captured from the ambient air and made into waveforms – something between Louis and Bebe Barron soundtrack for Forbidden Planet and an afternoon’s progress corrupting the preset patterns on a drum machine.

“Twist Her” begins with the pulse of a disfigured human heart beneath a disfigured human voice and seems to pull rhythms around it out of shame and anger. “Screen Love” and “303X” sound like a before and after series of photographs of cities grayed by industry and blown apart by tumult.

All four tracks here share a love of ambient noise, machine rhythms and the effect of the atmosphere on human consciousness. If that’s the kind of thing you don’t need in your set I would suggest it’s the kind of thing you could do with more of in your life.