Prequel Tapes – Everything Is Quite Now

Boredom, anxiety, painkillers and frustration make a heady mix for both reflection and action. For three weeks I stared out of the window of the tower block onto the tall brick towers of the old asylum chimneys. The past was a strange land suddenly out of reach, the present confusing and claustrophobic, the future something I could only visualise and idolise.

From the balmy Autumn day of my release a light was switched on, buzzing urgently like a neon street lamp on my path. Life took on new vigour and meaning. Pleasures starkly illuminated, annoyances inconsequential. Old work was re-examined and appreciated. Machines treasured and connected. My basement filled with ever greater warmth and excitement.

The toy towns of our inner minds are constructed of a million tiny building blocks of experience. There’s a freedom that comes from realising what might have been. Peace in reflection, and I take pleasure in the hum drum. Unhampered by trends, untethered to a scene, stripped back to essential carnal influences and desires. Who are we but the sum of our experience.

‘Everything Is Quite Now’ meanders through a reimagined landscape of personal history, releasing musical fragments to drift among soaring treetops, hollowed lakes and labyrinthine concrete structures, liberated from genre and form – alive at last. In these great expanses, light and dark are presented not as polar opposites, but as a limitless, unified whole.

References to EBM and industrial techno manifest within the sporadic percussive framework whilst gauzy ambient backdrops form an entire world of their own, constructed from the gentle hiss of a looping tape, the booming caverns of a muffled kick, the vivid distortions of a crystalline synth. In the depths of a misty forest, warmth permeates, absorbing inside it all of the darkness, pain, romance and beauty from before.

Prequel Tapes is a work of deep synthesis. Fragments of melody and memory orchestrated into densely layered tapestries; a deeply emotional study on a life characterised by a shifting relationship to electronics. The pieces serve as a chronology of desire and reflection, reconciling a nascent passion for industrial music with a history in the club. Oscillating between utopian to claustrophobic, the evolving synth work, deep techno atmosphere and traces of clangorous energy of early European ambient and industrial tell a distinctly German tale, forged between the forest and the autobahn.

Everything is quite now. What else can it be.
Release date 07 September 2018
Tracklist

01 Returning Systems
02 This Hidden Place
03 Everything Is Quite Now
04 Under
05 Run Into The Night
06 Clouds
07 Soon
08 Night Noise Lullaby
09 Core (Red)