Experimental music hasn’t had a great reaction from me over the last 15 days, and going into Add N to (x) I was scared that it would be just more of the same: noise very well put together nut that didn’t gel well with me.
Thank the Lord then for early 80’s Doctor Who incidental music preparing me for this.
Avant Hard is amazing. I didn’t think I’d be typing that, but I really liked listening to this album. Is it odd? Yep. Did I know what I was listening to? Not really. Was is a lot of fun? Oh, hell yeah.
It’s unfair of me to compare this album to the worst era of Doctor Who music but it was what I was scared of this being when I turned it on. Instead it had so much more charm than any of that and sounded more like the creation of Delia Derbyshire but with a level of sheen and refinement she wasn’t able to hammer down.
My favourite track on the album is the most conventional, Buckminster Fuller, with it’s twisted guitar distortion and even more twisted synth underneath, with a frantic drum beat underpinning the whole song. It initially sounds repetitive but the synth changes and mutates as the track goes along as it just keeps getting more weird. I couldn’t help but listen.
To go back to Doctor Who again, Steve’s Going to Teach Himself Who’s Boss sounds like the cyberleader from Tomb of the Cyberman is doing his DJ set and I just smiled harder and harder, especially when the sound effect of the Autons were slowly piped in as well.
This is not an album that I will visit often, or maybe even ever again. But that doesn’t matter, I think. I really enjoyed listening to how weird it was and how much it was willing to piss about without it’s own sound. It’s an exciting listen and I wanted the album to keep going. Everything was changing enough to be interesting and I never got bored, the cardinal sin of music.
For tomorrow, I think I’m going to need a First Aid Kit.
adamunwin.com 