Paul Snowden (AKA Time Attendant) and Maybury capture the surreal sensuality of Penny Slinger‘s story in shuttering drone and distempered decay. The merest sense of rhythm lurking in a marginalised menagerie of modular synapse and scissored sizzle. That pendulum(ed) strum that doomically chimes on “Purgatory In Control Of Us” inviting tempting flashes of the artist’s inner world.
As the documentary’s narrative unravels, it’s a soundtrack that revels in a hiccup of lizardly tones that atmospherically coax at Slingers’ aesthetic, apocalyptically flies on collaged collagen. The roomy nature of neglect lucidly licked. The lichen-covered brickwork of Lilford Hall rivered in reverbed clank and callipered click. The excellently entitled “Rats In Our Mind” finds its numb kinetics knitting a darkening corridor to who knows where. The contracted granulars of “Stranded Here For All Of Eternity” mark a cogged interior measuring a bubbling cavern of internal time, complete with hamster-wheeled gulls. A teasing taste of otherness suddenly cut to the ill-harmonic mirrors of “Out Of Formation”.
Film-wise, a lot of this is repetitively decorative, extended for the talking heads to chat over or used to forge a bridge for the film’s superb editing, but the vibes truly shine when they are left to sonically stipple the power of Penny’s arresting imagery (the sinister action in the cover artwork is a rather tasty example). Artwork that may have been conceived in the 1960s and 70s, but still kicks you in the gut with its directness and arresting ambiguity all these years later.
Theirs is a crafted vibe that fuels plenty of further investigation into this artist’s work — the highest compliment that any soundtrack can pay to its subject matter.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
