Howlround – Torridon Gate

A Year in the Country

In which the affable retronauts of Howlround limber up their trusty reel-to-reel tape recorders and feed in the sound of the built environment in order to make a fearsome and at times gently life-affirming visit to pastures so old and venerable that they are of course back in style. And what a stye it is – lush reverb and rippling scurries of what sound like – but aren’t, probably – voices skirl and scree across the aether. It’s like finding the whole of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop special effects department from circa 1964 fiddling and experimenting with some new skiffy sounds to broadcast in glorious monochrome as backdrop to an eerie yet highly-influential series involving children, moors and probably some kind of mysterious contact from other worlds.

And otherworldy is the best adjective for what Howlround are up to here -i plunging deep into the textural qualities of magnetic tape with the single-minded approach which characterised a time when there simply weren’t the resources to make the unheimlich sound so resolutely convincing; yet the broadcast pioneers managed it, and so too do Howlround, magnificently and without the aid of external effects. Only one question remains; what exactly is the Torridan Gate which this recording celebrates? Is it a portal to other worlds, the site of ghostly hauntings which follow on from the car crashes which resulted from not paying attention to all the road safety films which screened endlessly at the closing of the TV each night and between the first and second feature at the flicks? A ghastly paranormal haunting which lurks, ready to jump out at any bunch of teenagers so careless as to explore the eponymous old manor house in grainy saturated colour one Friday evening; or perhaps the passageway between the galaxies that Quatermass must pass through in streaks of video feedback and ominous lighting effects in order to save London from a fate worse than Edward Heath?

By the sounds of it, it could be any or all of the above; somewhat more prosaically, it’s the actually a garden gate on Torridon Road in suburban Hither Green, London which Howlround made just one recording of (in response to a prize-winning bid by the gate’s owners as part of the fundraising efforts for ResonanceFM) and used as the sole sound source for this record. Restriction being the mother of invention and all that, the results here being the proof, the pudding and perhaps even the eating too.

-Richard Fontenoy-