This sophomore record from Smallgang and Crumbling Ghost drummer Matthew Atkins is a sparse, haunting collage of atmospherics and natural sounding instrumentation. Roadside Picnic begins with the clamour of people before settling into a sorrowful ambient cooing accompanied by a circling potter’s wheel like noise and the shuffling feel of movement all around that. It feels like being inside the head of someone at once stuck within and yet utterly detached from the urban environment all around them, the cityscape occasionally managing to penetrate their bubble.
Trace Elements is a quiet field recording, what sounds like rainwater trickling down a gutter, the rainfall getting gradually heavier, it’s oddly comforting and cosy. The Voices of Ghosts is less welcoming, slip sliding sounds echo like a doctor’s scales, whilst heightened chatter bubbles away in the distance like an argument rising outside your window, and the ominous tone that creeps in like radio static and the spooky sound of voices through tunnels lends a further David Lynch-like atmosphere of unease, like walking through a dimly lit multi-storey car park with no discernible exit.
For a while Absence almost seems to live up to its title, speakers need a hasty adjustment to pick up the muffled, crunchy murmur and insectoid shuffling. Other curious sounds timidly poke their heads out now and then, some sound like stuttering liquid travelling backwards and at one point a text message is received quietly in the background. Final track Only Sadness Remains jolts you out of the eerie quiet, into a different kind of eerie, synths looming over you like dark zeppelins, it has a slow steady pace like a gigantic pair of lungs drawing deep breaths and a Vangelis-like angelic synth caught up in the middle of dense, murky surroundings.
At times this record is like a big blanket that you wrap yourself in, at others it’s disquieting and suffocating, but in that good way, like the aforementioned David Lynch, the sort of uncomfortable you’re almost willing to ‘endure’. Like the best minimal recordings it’s extremely evocative both in its subtle and more vividly realised moments.
[Rating:4]
