A strange and ultimately rewarding new release from the label that has built its reputation on strange and ultimately rewarding releases. ‘Plan 9′ kicks in, sounding science-fiction alright, but not Ed Wood – much more low budget late 70s/early 80s BBC, all plastic synth blips and live drums. The theremin whine does make an appearance in the background, though, just to get that knowing smile on your face.
There’s 3 main forms of music across Home/Hidden – the aforementioned cheap synthetic plink-plonk, a much more lush orchestration as appears on ‘Francisca’s Theme’, and work created on a buzzy, seldom tuned tack piano which appear later on in the album, on tracks such as ‘Telephone Song’ and ‘Kyoko’s Broken Piano’. As the album progresses, these slightly disparate elements congeal more cohesively and it is this that leaves me, at album’s end, feeling like it has unfurled out before me and, what initially sounded strange, pulled together to make sense.
There’s no getting away from the feeling that many of these tunes sound like theme songs or soundtrack music, perhaps even that dark, mysterious world of library music. It’s in the track titles – ‘Mao’, ‘Snow Feet’ or ‘The Lost Levels’. But this is not soundtracking in the grandiose manner of Hollywood, or even detached European abstraction. It is a very specific and nostalgic Britishness, remembered from small screen visual inspiration. It reminds me very much of nature documentaries I watched as a child in the early 80s, or British drama of the same era. In contrast with much contemporary post-rock and bass-fueled rhythm music, which constantly seek grandeur and infinite space, there is an overwhelming pull here towards smallness – towards acoustic space about the size of a suburban living room. It’s a remarkably refreshing change.
Perhaps I’ve interpreted the title, Home/Hidden, too literally and defined this music by the boundaries I perceive March has given it. But the sense of a nostalgia for something that is not often on the receiving end of a revisionist glow gives the work an incredible charm and I’m quite satisfied to be transferred back to the feelings of pre-internet, even pre-video, vivid yet unrecordable (at the time) engagement with culture from the other side of the world.
Adrian Elmer
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