Pulled back from obscurity by label honcho Alan Gubby, these choice selections from the long-defunct Arcadia Cosmos sound library excite, get in your head, inspire.
Sounds that inhabit their titles and more, gift-wrapped in the spiky jiver of a monochromed power station. Sophisticated atmospherics that start with the unusual treble-chipped, tensive-tippled urgency of “Danger” by Klaus Back and Tini Beier. It’s multi-pronged persuasive thrust / cut into / dancing like a distorted milk-bottled ambulance painting a pretty compelling emergency.
Sonics tipped casually into the chemically reactive “Electrolysis” by Eric Stone, trickling in layered melodies. A brief vignette lifting into the percussive pearl of “Endurance Test” by David Beast (why have I not heard of this person until now?). A snappy bacofoil joust, slam-chuted into a rhythmic cutlery drawer, surfing this gliding “Autobahn”-like glow.He appears twice more a little later on — once on the frog-croaked basslines of “Powers Of Darkness” before limbering nostalgic like a Tangerine Dream pudding, all elasticated Escape From New York dramatics greasily leaking extra shimmer. Maybe we’ll be treated to a whole album’s worth in the future; I don’t know, but one thing’s for sure — you’re never going to be able to pigeonhole his imagination.
This collection cohesively calls, as each track increases the mystery, steps up from what you expect commercial library music to be, invested with personalty, keenly descriptive. The dark clench of “Industrial Espionage” by Peter Hunt hitting like a balaclava dance of up-to-no-good Impressionism. Its slivery sonics flash-lit with shadow casting off-key notes that place your mind right in the action. Mixing in some abstraction, the unicorned modulars of Back and Beier’s “Interferences” becoming languid rosettes of colour Cluster-shot and beaming on trailing tonals and outward bubbles. A mummerating melody casting a vaporous hue towards “Koan” by Louis Reade, its inky-bell like glints and recoils, a brief wash that’s gleefully expanded later on with his “Resonances”. A track that takes Koan”’s silvery clang into a multitude of reflective tonals that hazily overlap, bloom around your head like an improvised Moondog matinee.I was greedy for more electro-acoustics, but the luted musicality of Peter Janda and Fritz Kober’s “Middle Ages” verges in a different direction brimming with a stretchy Bo Hansson-like thematic. A new agey sizzle, crystal-like droplets and all, being swept up by the nautilus-curled synthscape that is “Submerged Cultures”. A drone-soaked pleasure by Back and Beier (persons I’d love to hear more from too), cobwebby in a plight and premonition of evaporating keytones. A moody ambient shot catapulted into Silvia Sommer’s twee-shot of Radiophonic cuteness called “Tinguely”.
Vorsicht! is another unique hit from Buried Treasure that ends all to soon; here’s hoping there’s more in the pipeline.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
