

For forty-eight seconds, post-industrial grot tussles with twinkly daydream.
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An uncomfortable electronic hum and weirdly organic rattling (like mice beginning to panic inside a generator housing) passes into a bright nursery march played on assorted guitars, drums and bombastic little synths. Recorded in 1993 during Mikrokosmos’ cramped early sessions in west London, ‘In the Machine Room’ is an jarring but strangely satisfying hybrid of claustrophobic paranoia and sweet naivety. Two are brief snapshot instrumentals, deliberately left incomplete or brought to dismissive halts. There’s a stress on the regular and on the irregular, but no conclusion on either.Īs haunting as this can be (and it does build on regular repetition, an inconclusion which nags to be solved), it’s still Bic’s dark-psychedelia project Mikrokosmos which dominates this particular set, providing three tracks out of the five. All cases are left open mysteries which slip into shadowed corners of modern folklore or Lynchian dreams. All three are obliquely connected by hearts: their rhythms or their interruption, their presence as eviscerated occult trophies or as enigmatic markers presumably also by the locked-up desires, secrets and clues they contain. “A man who hears bells who loves cars” misses his train only to drop out of routine and out of existence a corporate lawyer vanishes during her solo boat trip fifty years ago, a cancer specialist who “wraps her dolls in graph-paper by the light of the moon” is last seen in car headlights by the edge of a cliff. Everything about the words doesn’t, as Jo narrates (in newsprint monotone) a set of disappearances. Something about the rhythm and chant suggests the cheesy old white-rap anti-classic ‘Ice Ice Baby’. Cobwebby analogue synth gurgles, dub distancings and dirty blats of fireworks. Guttural just-picked-it up guitar lines and milk-bottle vibraphone. It’s another recitation, delivered by Jo to pattering drumbox and orchestrated in minimal, thrifty make-do fashion. ‘The United Kingdom’ is (mostly) another eleven-year-old recovering from Jo Spratley’s Babyskullz solo project: one which just happens to fit in with ‘Bright Fivers’. In the end we never know what we know.” It sounds like something buried deep in peat in order to time-travel transmitting a warning, or possibly a testament.

Fire spreads her text of flame as serious as food / Our towers of graph paper fold up into the silence, / delicate as the girl who leaves the stone and the water – / and the bright moan of the green, / the collapse of a black age. Between the slopes fivers fly up onto the dream floor. Whether sung or spoken, the sentences are broken off dark, punching surrealist gobbets of foreseeing and ruin. You even hear the clunk as the mood shifts Jo switching abruptly into deadpan recitation against a Bic backdrop of guitar static and wind texture, as impassive as the prophetess taken over by the voice of the prophecy. That’s only the prelude, though, and it’s severed from the rest of the piece by a jump-cut edit as loud and merciless as a sucker punch or an axe blow. Initially, it’s his arpeggiating pianos (distanced and tinny, as if pulled from a dusty old 78) which dominates ‘Bright Fivers’ a solemn setting for Jo’s singing, which is loaded with both trepidity and authority. Unlike the archived cover versions refurbished for the previous EP, ‘Bright Fivers’ is an all-new, all-original April recording in which Chris contributes as the anagrammatic Cola Ray, collaborating with Bic and Jo’s MUMMY. (The third original Confinementeer, Jesse Cutts, has his own follow-up single too, but more on that later…) MUMMY: ‘CONFINEMENT-release3’ EPFollowing their pair of releases last month, Brighton’s Confinement Tapes project is back for a second round – this time with Confinementeers Jo Spratley and Bic Hayes joined by honorary family member Chris Anderson (of Worthing’s Crayola Lectern), who’s also worked with Bic in Brighton kosmische juggernaut ZOFFF alongside what seems like a good half of Brighton’s psychedelic contingent (and, occasionally, The House of Love’s Terry Bickers).
