been sitting on this since before santa squeezed his fat ass down the worlds collective chimneys. not because i don’t dig it (i do, greatly) but because well i couldn’t think what to say. or rather what little words came a-tumbling out just didn’t fit.

on reading the handfulla end of year lists i stumbled upon, this cropped up a lot. usually with the whole hypnagogic thang attached. a term that now just seems to be used as a catch-all for anything twinkly-synthy, spangly-droney and hypno-ritually coming out on konsumterror limited cassette runs over the past few years. stuff like rifts, i think, certainly falls into the foil-coated camp of skaters eighties-alluding terry reilly offshoots and all those fellas (and it almost always is fellas) ripping off john carpenters prince of darkness soundtrack, riffing on shiny tv works and video arcade exotica and jg ballard discordia and body fetishes. but how any of this fits into hypnagogia i’ll be buggered.

so recontextualising jan hammer or krautic synth work or ambient fzzz certainly has merit but lumping it in with c90 benzodiazepiners seems a bit silly and random. not saying there’s not a venn diagram here but to quote:

just means people who are alive at a certain period of time and have their antennas up and functioning are going to get similar input messages and they’re going to react to that those messages. beyond that, it’s all individual, and that’s what’s interesting.

which eventually brings me to rifts. a chronological collection on two shiny polycarbonate plastic discs of three old(er) records – betrayed in the octagon, zones without people, russian mind – and some randomerry. therefore a huge beast to unwrap but definitely worth the time to fumble clumsily with.

all three records seemingly built on a foundation of schulze and vangelis and tangerine dream. maybe with nods to future-present-past types like boards of canada and keith fullerton whitman. maybe with reference to terry reilly cosmic minimalism. in terms of contemporaries the closest i can figure is the inter-outer-extra-stellar cruisings of emeralds.

but it’s all synthesizer baby (except for the druggy guitar balladeering). for def a real tron meets phillip k dick, monged miami vice soundtrack vibe. it reeks of chrome and lipstick gloss and odd geometric animations on old computers. and there’s narratives hidden in there, retro-futuro stories of astronauts and other worlds. so yeah all very cinematic in my umble hopinion. like watching bladerunner (i see that skyline overandover listening to this) or 2001 now, more the experience of seeing imagined futureworlds from the present. not offering prescience but else- or alt- which makes it strangely old fashioned. if it came from over here i’d say it has a kitschy tomorrows world feel to it. but it doesn’t, so i won’t.

musically what you get is a mixed bag of roland and korg and pedals and anachronism: on transmat memories, the echoed and arpegiatting lopes towards some horizon flatline; on terminator lake the 8-bit biology and haunted machine voom. everything else is all major tom floating forever in space and euclidean sculptures of moaning groaning proggisms. it’s a chimera of noise and techno and drone and soviet space-station minimalist chic. at times bare-boned and stark – see the epic deep space nothingness at the heart of woe is trangression – and at times overflowing with warm gloop. but always with the odd sensuality of those old adrian chesterman covers on penguins sci-fi books.

no fun productions / myspace / opn