Lorelle Meets The Obsolete – Corporal / Sister Ray Davies – Holy Island / Perrache – Letter To Jane EP / Loula Yorke – Hydrology / Polypores – Hungry Vortex

There is undoubtedly no productivity crisis in the broad spheres of nouveau shoegaze and DIY electronica, with complementary manoeuvres and convergence playing out between them to boot. This is certainly apparent in sifting through another review pile on the verge of toppling over, replete with a lot of familiar suspects from some reliable sources.

Having pushed themselves even further away from their psych-rock-infused beginnings, with the no wave-meets-industrial strains of 2023’s Datura and some stellar smorgasbord live shows, Guadalajara’s Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’s latest LP for Sonic Cathedral finds the flexible multi-instrumentalist duo reaching out into deeper and wider electronic environs.

With the synths and samplers upfront and Alvaro Castro’s hefty guest drums powering from behind, whilst the guitars and vocals are squeezed in and out through the middle, co-founders Alberto González and Lorena Quintanilla contort their craft into sumptuous, unearthly and imposing shapes across the eight often extended tracks of Corporal.

Thus, we’re transported through weighty Throbbing Gristle-meets-Power, Corruption & Lies-era New Order pulsations (“Regresar / Recordar” and “Palabra”); early-Goldfrapp sophistication under darker skies (“Ker”); Conrad Schnitzler-style fizzing irradiation (“Casi no estar”); ghostly dystopian atmospherics (“Riesgo”); and mordant neon-lit prowling (“Reanimar El Cuerpo” and “Control”).

Whilst the album may lack some easy individual inroads, the cumulative mass of Corporal gives it an uneasy yet alluring grip on the senses, which steadily increases in strength on successive spins. Lorelle loyalists will almost unquestionably appreciate its manifold attractions, as part of the still ongoing story.

Whilst punningly self-anointed Sonic Cathedral labelmates Sister Ray Davies may reconfirm concerns about a global shortage of new band names, the Muscle Shoals, Alabama based duo of Adam Morrow and Jamie Sego certainly don’t lack imagination with their debut long-player, Holy Island.

Inspired by the titular ancient religious tidal island found off the coast of north-east England (also known as Lindisfarne), as well as shoegaze classicism and synthetically-smeared Americana, the pair map out a studio set that adroitly blurs a lot of intriguing boundaries.

Consequently, after an eerie ambient prologue (“Lindisfarne”), the record deftly shimmers and rousingly soars through its remaining assembled pieces. With vocals only appearing sparingly amidst the tangling of electronics and guitars, we’re taken through echoes of The War On Drugs’ most motorik explorations (“Iona”); refractions of early Ride EPs (“Big Ships”); the aching swirliness of Slowdive’s finer epics (“Aidan”); an unashamed nod back to the baggie-adjacent Paris Angels (“Rowans”); ethereal ‘80s 4AD-isms (“Nave”); ecclesiastical effects-drenched fuzziness (“Cloisters”); and sideways salutes to the melancholic murmurings of Cheval Sombre (“Morning Bell”).

Whilst at times some more full-bodied songwriting might have given Holy Island greater substance, its many evocative passages pack in a lot of persuasive charms.

Over in wholly synth-cultivated pastures, three more solitary but familiar sonic harvesters yield a variety of crops.

Following on from his Freq-profiled Mt. Rubble album, released earlier this year, Stuttgart’s Joachim Henn reappears under his Perrache penname with the hyper-elemental and not-quite-accurately-named Letter To Jane EP mini-album for the Superpolar Taïps cassette / digital label. Testing the edges and depths of barely-thereness, with arcane analogue synth sounds and occasional incorporeal voices funnelled through his old school four-track recording set-up, these six tracks conjure up more curiously compelling otherworldliness.

Shifting through pulsing early-Suicide primitivism (“Stromschnelle” and “x”); antique sci-fi discombobulations (“Nachleuchtspur” and “La Vieillesse Est Un Naufrage”); ominously droning inversions (“Halbe Stromtankstelle”); and elegiac spacey tranquillity (“SMA v.3”), this is a collection in search of an avant-garde short film to conjoin with that consolidates Henn’s capabilities for forging fascination from the extremities of the aural ether.

Contrastingly more accessible but similarly attuned to elemental routings is the acclaimed and prolific Loula Yorke, who ventures into a favoured conceptual area of modern modular synth sculptors – notwithstanding birdsong, stargazing and the various stages of an apocalypse — that is the world of water. Across its half-dozen recordings, osmotically expanded over forty-two minutes, the DiN-dispensed Hydrology could be her finest and most approachable outing to date.

Flowing through balmy stretched-out aquatic lapping (“SICL”); trickling mountain spring-clear beauty (“Gleam”); undulating hypnotic pulses (“Fontana”); submarine hums and pings fused to mechanical rhythms (“Walberswick Breaks”); fidgety glistening effervescence (“Flumen”); and ice melting moodscapes (“Pressure Wave”), Hydrology commandingly recalls and fuses together filaments of vintage kosmische, New Age ambience, Brian Eno, Sam Prekop’s latter-day solo works and other contemporary fellow-travellers, whilst adding Yorke’s own distinct and enthralling imprint on top of it all.

Lastly, we find equally productive modular maestro Stephen Buckley rematerialising yet again in his Polypores guise for a long-awaited full-length for the kaleidoscopic Feral Child label. Refiltering and combustibly supplementing the ingredients sprinkled heavily through the psychedelic-jazz-prog fusing tracts contained within the preceding Cosmically A Shambles, unleashed through Cracked Ankles back in the summer, Hungry Vortex blows things up and out into four epically time- and mind-expanding cuts.

Near-twelve-minute opener “The Body Is A Spaceship” sets out the stall emphatically, insistently pushing its foot-stomp-mimicking drum machine reverberations into an absorbing churn of chirruping and free-range noise. Thereafter, the exclamatory “Wizards!” oscillates wildly between near-frenzy and tension-release via its multi-speeding arpeggiated synth strata and scrambled beats; the tremendous title track steadily swells itself from percussive minimalism to maximalism with added pastoral flute-like flourishes and basilica-friendly organ-aping trills; and the closing “Void High” soothingly ripples out proceedings with an utterly balmy blend of artificial symphonics and electro burbling.

In a more Polypores-orientated parallel reality, Hungry Vortex is potentially being performed live in the Royal Festival Hall by a super-group featuring members of Yes, Tangerine Dream, Tortoise and Osees, with an accompanying orchestra hand-picked by Steve Reich, to fully realise its ambitious and bustling vision — which is something that Stephen Buckley would likely approve of. However, until dimension shift options are available via your favourite ticketing app, Hungry Vortex is still a remarkable expression of man-meets-machine artistry, in this universe’s home listening presentation.

-Adrian-