Ship Canal - Please Let Me Back Into Your House

This came in, slipped under the door like a thin slice of cranial pie...



A friend of mine was prone to petit mal seizures, seizures of absence, slow-wave spikes. They'd often occur in the middle of a sentence; she'd just... go away for a few moments, sometimes long minutes, sometimes the last word she was saying would simply repeat and slurrrrrrr ad infinitum: "The thing with Feynman is that he he he he he he he he he he he he he he..." and then sometimes she'd pop back, continuing the sentence, sliding seamlesssly into the world again "...always knew exactly which knot to start untying..." while at other times her eyes would close and she'd drift away for a few more moments, the echoe dying, the dark coming in.

My favourite track on Please Let Me Back Into Your House, Ship Canal's debut on Kek's nonnanononboutique label 19F3, reminds me of her.

Fog (what is it with fog these days? I'm hearing fog everywhere) and shipwrecked audio and Lilith drones crossover and pulse and then this voice, this slurring, cracked voice appears, a man swallowing himself with language; a kind of absence with automatism, like an electronic divination, a table turning... it's one of the best things I've heard all year; it just works (cf these guys - in fact, these releases might be rough twins) in a way that lots of this kind of stuff just... doesn't.

If it catches you as it caught me - 7 AM, wind, rain, mist - then this will speak to you. It's dredged music, perhaps incomplete (I like the way some of the female siren sounds just kind of cut------ when you'd expect them to drift away) but powerful and quite... beautiful, in parts.

I've seen Ship Canal's kit: ugly PCs, ugly-hackkneed software, ugly cables... but he's making a right Schwitters out of this slop, this detritus. The last release on 19F3 (I take it we're not counting the Hacker Farm stuff - the politics of consciousness always seems tangled where Kek's concerned!) was the gentle machine chattering hum of the Werneck Wretchmond release (which I covered here); this new one is a step (just one step) away from the machines towards a very human breakdown...