Joinedbywire – _ 48 Space Platform

Striate Cortex

You might not know joinedbywire, but if you do, you’ll probably know them for their exquisite packaging. Their latest is no exception to that rule – it’s an entirely beautiful, apparently home-made, fabric-on-hardcase thing which makes me wonder quite why most CD packaging looks so hopelessly crap – especially limited run or self-released records. I’m not sure if a little .jpg will do it justice, but it’s my second favourite packaging of the year so far – the number one spot going to, uh, joinedbywire’s contribution to the 2020 project on Bang the Bore.

But we don’t buy records for sleeves… well, ok, some of us do, but it’s always nice when we do that and there’s a decent record underneath the prettiness. And – hurrah! – that’s the case here. [post=f-records-roundup text=”Elsewhere on Freq”] I described joinedbywire as like a “feral Ashtray Navigations” and I think in retrospect that might’ve been a bit off – _48 Space Platform seems to me less like the sort of filthy, spacey psych of Ash Nav and more like some meditation on a office full of broken faxes.

There’s a fair amount of this record throws signifiers out that suggest they’re on the noise side of the fence – walls of static and feedback, masses of hiss and very little in the way of clean, open notes – but it was only on my fourth listen or so I noticed that. Joinedbywire use mixing alarmingly well – third track “Thud Life 2” starts off with some lush, sedate bell-ringing samples and closes with one of those walls of static we’re all so very fond of. But how they get there is quite smart – there’s plenty of inning-and-outing of looped samples, guitar sounds, hiss and fuzz, and a pretty broad use of volume dynamics that makes it just the right side of considered studio composition – and for the whole record there’s never a sense of just going “quiet bit > building > wall of noise.”

I think it’s probably fair to say that joinedbywire aren’t the only band in the world using lo-fi loops, feedback and scree, but for my money they’re one of the few bands of that ilk who are constantly compelling in what they do. Although a lot of it (particularly the trve cvlt 16-minute closer “Drvm Lane Atomball”) tends towards being long and sounding like the inside of a fire in a church organ, there’s a real sense that nothing’s out-staying its welcome and all the elements are in there for good reason. Loops tend to repeat, but not keep repeating ad nauseam – rhythms tend to be moved and altered subtly and quietly, discretely amending dynamics… and in short, they’re probably the best in the game at this – or if nothing else, they deserve to be a lot better known than they are. Go, buy!

-Kev Nickells-