Meteor F. Atomic - This is How I Dance (2021)

I gather this is Danny Ayers, brother of Nigel and formerly of both the Pump and the first line-up of Nocturnal Emissions, which should be enough to at least dispel expectations of This is How I Dance sounding like the Detroit Spinners. I'm not sure whether this ever had any sort of official release back in 1981 when it was recorded, but suspect it was probably a few copies handed out to friends, at best. Anyway, here it is again, possibly for the first time, thanks to the revived Sterile Records, and I'm surprised it's taken this long in some respects. I'm not saying This is How I Dance is life-changing, but it's surprisingly listenable for something with such basic ingredients.

What little background detail we have reports that This is How I Dance was recorded directly onto cassette, which is entirely believable; and it might be viewed as a single lengthy work in four movements, if you really want to. Most of it seems to be mains hum, rummaging around inside a transistor radio with a screwdriver, things recorded off the telly on shitty condenser mics, hiss, and the sort of feedback we used to summon by holding our massive Tony Blackburn style headphones up to the microphone. There's a degree of repetition but I'm not even sure our man was using anything so fancy as a tape loop, and it may just be actions repeated over and over live into the cassette deck. The second movement, if that's what it is, utilises a Boss DR55 drum machine, albeit more as a noise source than for the sake of rhythm, phase pedals, and what sounds like a Casio VL-Tone; so suffice to say, the whole enterprise resembles things I've heard before, albeit a long time ago, and yet remains fresh thanks to the Meteor's sense of invention and the sheer impossibility of working out what the hell's coming next, plus the textures, rough as fuck though they often are, are gorgeous. Imagine Tissue of Lies without the sensory overload, and oddly hypnotic. This is How I Dance proves that the size of either the budget or the studio never mattered.