This gentleman is Paul Snowdon, an artist and musician who records under the name of Time Attendant. His new album, Bloodhounds, has been on the TOMTIT turntable and various mobile devices for weeks now, and is only just beginning to give up its mysteries.
For us, most modern electronic albums seem either glacial and ungiving or too eager to be liked, but 'Bloodhounds' bucks the trend by being a very warm, but affably ambiguous record.
Sometimes it sounds like a partially unspooled techno tape, but it also evokes Henk Badings or Tom Dissevelt or Tristam Cary and the other greats of the post war electronic music scene. Mostly, it provides the soundscape and lets the listener provide the landscape: unlike many 21st century projects the artwork and song titles don't make it clear what you are supposed to hear, to think, to feel, to enjoy, to 'get'. Instead, Paul concentrates on intriguing and baffling and exciting the ear with a huge panoply of fascinating made noises, found sounds, field recordings, bleeps, bloops, swoops and swipes and then leaves the rest up to you. We think we identified a colony of bats leaving a cave at one point, but it might equally have been a mouse in a trap or a squeaky ducking stool.
As an example of the immersive qualities of this superb record, Unmann-Wittering was listening to it just yesterday whilst wandering around a branch of W.H Smith, and was so transfixed by the closing track ('Fuchsia Circles') that he became dangerously over stimulated and spent £18 on stationary he didn't need and £31.75 on magazines, including one about military modelling, a pursuit he hasn't been interested in since the late eighties.
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