Vernon & Burns hark back to an earlier era of recorded sound, when novelty and comedy acts didn’ reach their use by date after five minutes of fame on the Internet, but managed to produce long-playing vinyl albums. Artefacts that subsequent generations of deejays rescued from thrift store bargain bins before cutting, scratching and manipulating them into new shapes and forms. The Light at the End of the Dial stands alongside with purveyors of a skewed form of electronica such as Stock, Hausen & Walkman, Wevie Stonder and People Like Us.
Vernon & Burns have quite an impressive oeuvre of sound making prior to this release on Felix Kubin’ Gagarin Records label. Starting out in 1999 with Radio Tuesday, an artist-run radio station in Glasgow skirting around the borders of soundscapes, documentaries, poetry and experimental music, they have moved on to enlighten and baffle such cultural institutions as WFMU, Resonance FM and the BBC with their radio plays and kitchen sink dramas.
On The Light at the End of the Dial, “Sinister Whimsy’ is a term that kept coming to mind. A case in point is the sad, disembodied voice of a young man that sounds uncannily like Peanuts’ Charlie Brown on Residual Values (It’s a Yes Man’ Life), “All he does is work, all he cares about is money. He doesn’ care about you, me or anyone.†Tip-tapping typewriters, the hum of a busy office, and frantic percussion seem to comment on our current obsessions without passing judgement. In Here Come The Intangibles, a free-jazz outfit stop in to unblock a sink for a distressed neighbour. The Night we Invented Forgetting comes on all loungey, with crooned evocations to a sadly absent loved one, complete with a backing of kid’ xylophone, Martin Denny textures and slamming doors.
The Last Lamppost’s beautifully eerie whistling refrain is slowly fleshed out by found sounds (creaky, of course) and a demented orchestra with only broken instruments to amuse themselves with. Spontaneous Adverse Experience Report reminds me of two grown men fighting over a game of Frogger, only to have Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic workshop join in to score the carnage. And if Vernon & Burns really are slighted lovers, no one can help them; as is evidenced by the insanely jealous psychic dis-ease of Naughty Boy.
If your tastes in comedy are dark and resolutely Britsh, and you aren’ averse to mixing that slapstick urge with a distinctly rubbery brand of cod-surrealism, The Light at the End of the Dial may be just that.
Oliver Laing
