Gregory Nieuwsma – A Guide For Getting Lost / Giants Of Discovery – Two Arrow Falls (From Chester City Walls) / Joe Higham – Light Seekers

Preston Capes / Woodford Halse

The convergence of Bandcamp’s borderless extents, the more positive community-minded corners of social media and the increasing ease of home recording has produced a near-ceaseless flow of artists entangled in electronics, hybrid instrumental set-ups and wordless conceptual constructions over the last six or seven years.

Yet for all of this near-endless accessibility, it still requires small enterprises with big enthusiastic hearts and calm organisational heads to provide platforms for making sense of it all. One character providing such contextual curation services is the Doncaster-based Mat Handley.

As the brains behind the interlinked Woodford Halse, Preston Capes, Fenny Compton and Luddite Tapes labels, Handley – who also records under his well-regarded Pulselovers persona — has put out an impressive run of digital, cassette, CD and lathe-cut seven-inch vinyl wares since 2018. Whilst the latter two imprints focus on neo-pastoral practitioners and retro-tech rewinding respectively, the former two outlets correspondingly grant space for crossbreeding creatives and edge-pushing experimentalists.

The latest batch of goods to arrive from the sprawling but well-managed house of Handley comes courtesy of the Preston Capes and Woodford Halse side of the business. First up, from the Chicago-raised, but currently Kraków-residing Gregory Nieuwsma, is A Guide For Getting Lost (Preston Capes) in cassette / digital form.

Feeding gradations of treated guitars into an array of sound collage-like arrangements across the eight distinctive compositions, Nieuwsma takes us through electro-acoustic echoes of late-period Gastr del Sol (“The Slow Process Of A Moment Revealing Itself”), warped choral swirls (“Pantheon, 6am”), meditative intimacy with shades of Aerial M (“Under A Quilt”), rippling dronescapes (“Napoleon The 8th”), inverted chamber music (“Nightshade”) and woozy avant-folk warmth (“The Pleasure Of Getting Lost”) with intrepidly agile sequencing.

Whilst certainly not AI-generated easy listening, A Guide For Getting Lost is remarkably compelling in its resourceful scope. Less sonically segmented is Giants Of Discovery’s Two Arrow Falls (From Chester City Walls) on bigger-sibling label Woodford Halse.

As the freshest outing from the one-man alias of Kevin Downey, this is a release that oxymoronically embraces the uninterrupted flow of expansiveness minimalism facilitated by its CD / digital-only delivery. It finds the Wirral-based Downey deploying a mélange of modular synths, electric guitars, live bass and effects, in unconfined service of a conceptual arc around Cheshire’s Viking heritage, with an album title cribbed from The Domesday Book, no less.

Musical implements and historical inspirations aside, this is an aural immersion bath of a listen that blurs the boundaries between amorphous ambience and loosely-rooted melodicism. Therefore, over the eight vocal-less components we’re washed downstream through watery Polypores-infused elementalism (“Church In A Wood (Odecerce)”), early-Tortoise-meets-primordial-era-Aphex Twin currents (“Bruna’s Stronghold (Brunburg”)), ethereal Brian Eno-goes-vintage-4AD balminess (“Heather Island On The Marsh (Lying​-​Holmr)”) and out-to-the-sea shimmering (“Moonlight On Myrtle Corner (Wir Heal)”.

Being both soothingly earthy and disconcertingly spectral, Two Arrow Falls… is another thoughtfully adept addition to the already generously proportioned Giants Of Discovery canon. Less explicitly thematic and more overtly synth-driven is Joe Higham’s Light Seekers, which also arrives on Woodford Halse in CD and digital incarnations.

The six gathered extended cuts from the Brussels-based polymath fuse modular-melded frameworks with a scattering of samples into something that sits somewhere between visiting a playful but challenging multimedia art installation and a night in flicking through the record collection of a scholarly subscriber to The Wire magazine.

Thus, the opening titular track’s neon-lit free-range burbling gives way to pulsing arpeggio essaying (“Plucky”), glitchy meldings of The Radiophonic Workshop and early-noughties Warp Records (“Interlude”), visions of Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity being rewired for the laptop-era (“Radio Radio” and “Harquin”) and liberating percussive avant-jazz (“Nuevo”) — all strung-together with charmingly eccentric audio lab technician touches.

Taken from the evidence of this newest trio of auditory statements then, the world of Mat Handley’s micro-empire proves to be in robustly familiar as well as envelope-pushing rude health.

-Adrian-