Art of the Memory Palace Dusk at the Trellick Tower

Art of the Memory Palace - Dusk at Trellick Tower

Andrew Mitchell and Raz Ullah channel The New Brutalism and JG Ballard with an EP of lost-future pop music cached under béton brut

I laissez passer through the city on public ship and catch glimpses of electronic signs at the side of roads. "Get Ballardian" suggests one, flickering amber lights against black lath. "Get Brutalist!" states another, loudly in my head. Of class I incertitude what I'm reading, consider the words deeply embedded subliminal messages that are self-transmitting. Merely in that location'southward 1 more to take discover of and I translate it as a ready of instructions, a map to a fourth dimension and place: "Dusk at Trellick Tower".

Hungarian builder Ernő Goldfinger believed then completely in his post-war social housing project Balfron Tower that he moved into apartment 130 with his married woman Ursula Blackwell. JG Ballard extrapolated upon Goldfinger with the character Anthony Royal in High-Rise, who sits like a god atop the crumbling homo experiment beneath him. The Dusk at Trellick Belfry EP straight references some other Brutalist masterwork by Goldfinger and draws upon Ballardian cartographies of physical dreams.

Dundee's Andrew Mitchell and Manchester's Raz Ullah are municipal representatives of their population centres brought together as Art of the Memory Palace. Theirs is a lost-future pop music buried under béton brut and allowed to set, leaving fascinating imprints from the formwork. Synthscapes ascent and fall like cities over centuries, populated with Mitchell'southward near-distant vocals. Like some mad architect drunkard on utopian hubris, 2022 has already seen Mitchell release ane of the standout albums of recent times (The Paralian, under his Andrew Wasylyk persona). That he has teamed upward with Ullah to sonically animate Brutalism may well be also much for the founder of a website named afterwards a JG Ballard novel.

Art of the Memory Palace take built a very particular musical infinite for themselves with Dusk at Trellick Tower, which puts them out there alone, at the vanguard of a movement that doesn't notwithstanding exist. Although The Design Forms album on Ghost Box would at least make for an interesting companion piece. TPF's bucolic 1980s electronic pop feels like an escape from the city, but only as far as to a commuter boondocks. Concrete is therefore still in the procedure of dominating the landscape rather than having become the landscape itself. Each group'due south arroyo to pop music is steeped in modernist moments, taking from the forward-thinking past to construct hidden futures in the nowadays.

"Wretched Mortal" is modernist pop in the vein of Broadcast that feels equally if it is soaking up 1960s utopianism from the heaven. Synthesisers surge through the metropolis's arterial passages, slicing beyond the highest heights and lowest depths. The lost SF future of "Black Lighthouse" is a pulse transmission animating residents traversing endless apartment buildings in air-conditioned elevators. Meanwhile, electronic washes wipe clean the surfaces of "Man Spectre", as an isolated protagonist contemplates his strained human interactions from cell-similar living quarters. "Flooring 30-Ane" is a punctuation bespeak, an ambient ident advertising the two-role title tracks, a trip to Rekall Incorporated, or both. Retention is reignited on "Sunset at Trellick Belfry Part ane" with its corporate library music submitted to psychedelic exploration and hints of Radiohead-in-the-underpass circa OK Computer. "Function 2" evokes the distorting concrete spaces earlier the utopian dream breaks and is all-time illustrated by a passage from Ballard's High-Rise:

"Laing lay back on his balcony, watching the dusk autumn beyond the façades of the adjacent blocks. Their size appeared to vary co-ordinate to the play of lite over their surfaces. Sometimes, when he returned home in the evening from the medical school, he was convinced that the high-ascension had managed to extend itself during the day. Lifted on its physical legs, the forty-storey block appeared to exist even college, every bit if a grouping of off-duty construction workers from the television studios had casually added another flooring."

This was a subliminal message.