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DALHAM

Dalham

Cobra

On a remote gravel-covered spit of land on the east coast lie the abandoned buildings of a government facility for weapons testing and experiments with radar.

In the mid 1960s this site witnessed the construction of an over-the-horizon radar, a technological marvel bouncing signals off the ionosphere, built to covertly monitor the activities of other nations.

The reflectivity of the ionosphere is a function of frequency, time of day, time of year and of the solar cycle. In essence, a sympathy for the celestial was required to fully exploit this man made construction.

Plagued by noise that created false returns on the monitors, the intended performance was never achieved, and despite several investigations the system was shut down and eventually dismantled in the early 1970s.

The long dormant Cobra is now a nature reserve.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A more gloomy but impeccably brilliant affair here from Dalham, with all of their meticulously written melodies and finely wrought developments coated in a sheen of shadowy unease and crunchy analogue haze. It's all good, never a dull sound.

TRACK LISTING

1. Pulse Repetition
2. Absolute Elsewhere
3. The Proxy
4. Progress Report
5. Buran
6. Tesseract
7. Backscatter
8. Frequency Shift

Dalham

And The Sun

As humankind strives to create artificial intelligence what will faith, love, or morality look like to a nascent consciousness? Will it be capable of understanding its creators who often hold logic and superstition within themselves? In return how will humans comprehend its hallucinations? And the Sun, a ball of hot plasma oblivious to our existence continually burns hydrogen until it runs out and swallows its three closest neighbours.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Rare modern braindance music that's hugely innovative, non-derivative and genuinely wonderfully put together. Rippling synths and machinated drum machine glitches break into widescreen bliss and retro-futuristic momentum.

TRACK LISTING

1. Vorei
2. Air
3. Jawns
4. Redd
5. Kristall
6. XOR
7. Chalk
8. Tare

Dalham

Funf

For the first time, Jon Michaelides allows his Dalham project more space to breathe in two new long tracks of sky-scraping, world building ambient (or is it) techno.

Dalham is the long term of project of Suffolk born Londoner, Jon Michaelides.
Here he discusses “Fünf” (his fifth release, natch), which is subtitled “The Past Is a Foreign Country”: “There have always been “ambient” tracks on previous albums but they have in some ways served as a bit of peace and respite from the more busy percussive tracks. The purchase of some effects units triggered the decision to use delays and reverbs during the composition process much more and an entirely ambient record seemed the best vehicle for this. I was simultaneously attempting, and not for the first time, to fully grasp the concept of special relativity and so a record about time and space, focussed on the manipulation of time (delay) and space (reverb) was born.

“Some of the phenomena associated with this theory, for example the relativity of simultaneity, lead to the questioning of the nature of reality and at times a sense of disconnect with much of what was happening in the concrete world. Coupled with the desire to revisit the past, where certain friends and family are still alive and well, this set the emotional tone for these two extended tracks. Fünf is a journey to acceptance. Not only is the past a foreign country, but our passports have been revoked and we won’t be returning.”

It’s interesting that Jon uses the term “ambient”: ”I guess I call it ambient because it doesn’t have any ‘beats’ but yes, it is still very rhythmic.”

For many, these compositions will sound too intricate and complex to be termed “ambient”, but as ever, we find it difficult to find the words to describe the unique music that Jon makes. A true individual, there is literally nobody else that sounds like Dalham.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Dalham's 'Funf' is a wonderfully realised selection of crystalline synth walls and cavernous reverbed spaces, bringing to mind a juxtaposition of the evocative soundtrack work of Drokk or Survive mixed with the ambient swells and catatonic heft a-la Jon Power / Blanck Mass. Another amazing CiS release.


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