Aeternal Flux II

  This work of outsider electronica is David K Frampton’s first fully instrumental solo album release and one that harkens back to his EDM origins with Truck Pitch and Process Records in the late 1990s. The head honcho of Eyeless Records has often favoured a raw approach to recording and mixing – wrong notes sometimes left in, adding oyster grit to pristine melodies – that recalls the home studio origins of Ariel Pink or R. Stevie Moore. A cultivated naivety has been a feature of his solo work since Love Songs and Other Mysteries . Here we’re without the Brighton-based artist’s fragile high-pitched vocal lead and harmonies that can sometimes recall the dream pop gauze of Sigur Ros on releases like Tune Flower . He draws for this album upon the minimal techno and isolationist dub influences of Robert Hood and Scorn circa Gyral to produce a set of variations on simple rhythmic themes. Frampton manipulates drum beats and bass lines live to produce six meditations, as he puts it, “on ...

  My Octopus Mind’s new single ‘No Way Outta Here Alive’ lyrically conjures the claustrophobic oppression of 21C hive dreaming. The music provides rewarding insights into the honeycomb complexities of our age of microgenres. They tread a pathway limned by the passionate neo-prog of The Mars Volta and black midi that winds between the math complexity of fellow Bristoleans Ogives Big Band and the monomaniacal post-rock heft of Hey Colossus. There are similar reflections on the discontents of civilization in the vein of Radiohead and Queens of the Stone Age as MOM’s 2020 single ‘The Great Escape’, balanced with a humour that owes something to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. There’s less of the Balkan rhythms and chamber rock flavours prevalent on their last full-length album Faulty at Source but they retain that release’s heavy psychedelic edge and Mars voltage. His axe suitably amplified and channeled through an effects arsenal, upright bass player Isaac Ellis summons enough f...