Nigel Ayers - The Vault (2026)

 

I've a feeling I should probably credit this as the work of Sara Lamb and Nigel Ayers. It's Nigel's sonic counterpart to the paintings of Sara Lamb, recently partnered as something along the lines of an installation in the wilds of Lostwithiel, Cornwall. I'm not sure whether the sound is a response to the paintings, or whether it's the other way around, or perhaps six of one and a half dozen of the other. YouTube footage shows the paintings on display along with a stack of sketchbooks in a caravan of the type once drawn by horses, with this music supplementing the ambience. I'm not certain whether the caravan is the only place the gestalt has been presented, but if so it's something I can appreciate given that neither artist seems entirely aligned with anything you might term the usual channels.

I've had occasion to frown upon persons who make a funny noise, stick it through a reverb unit with the decay set to twenty-five years, then call it dark ambient. The sonic component of The Vault is deceptively minimal with sounds resembling bells repeated as an intermittent organic rhythm against a distant wall of its own delay set to at least a century, the effect of which is neither dark nor entirely ambient. If anything it has the celestial sound of something vast and radiantly bright which is cumulatively overpowering despite the sense of space - akin to watching sunrise in a locale where you can no longer hear traffic. It does the same thing for an hour, or presumably for as long as you want if you visited the installation - which isn't quite the right word but I'm sure you know what I mean. Yet it feels as though it's constantly changing, or maybe evolving, yet might also be deemed timeless. It isn't noise, and it's thematically the opposite of industrial, for those of you who need to know such details.

As I expect I've said before, much of Nigel's work - at least this century - sounds like the result of an almost geological compositional process closer to the spread of lichen across granite than plugging it in to see what sort of scary sounds we can come up with; and Sara Lamb's painting appears to share some of this quality - a channelling which occurs regardless of the broader spectrum of western art, almost regardless of the person holding the brush or twiddling the oscillator—not so much outsider art as true art, something many of us no longer recognise through having become so accustomed to that which is served up by the factories.

In the event of none of the above making sense, it's jolly good.

Summon from yonder portal. 

Dick Hyman - The Age of Electronicus (1969)

 

This turned up in a batch of donations from a very, very old person who, having been left technologically beached by the endless march of progress - or at least the endless march of built-in obsolescence - was no longer able to appreciate all those Mantovani discs. To be fair, of the hundred or so vinyl records, it was a fairly interesting selection with some decent stuff, the strangest of all probably being this. I gather back during the dawn of the synthesiser, specifically the Moog synthesiser, there was a lot of this around - selections of pop hits magically transformed into futuristic cybermusic to be enjoyed by Martini-chugging sophisticates at dinner parties and which now sounds like the music enjoyed by the evil penguin in The Wrong Trousers. Typically, we get a couple of Beatles numbers performed by electronic bees but never mind.

It takes a little getting used to given the difficulty of listening without the mind's eye becoming flooded with images of ironic teenagers, but not so much as you might expect. Dick Hyman was - and incredibly still is at the time of writing - a respected jazz pianist with a great ear for sound dynamics if this album is an indication, and the jazz drums complement the electronics beautifully. The possibly inevitable Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da is about as good as you'd expect and is dispensed with at the beginning of side one, in the wake of which the choices are interesting enough to allow for some sense of individual expression beyond populist novelty robotics. So we get a cover of James Brown, two from Booker T & the MGs and a Joni Mitchell number (which greatly improves on the original) amongst others. The magnetic poles of the record might be Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da at one extreme and Kolombo, Hyman's own composition, at the other. Kolombo with its moody rhythm and pseudo-Arabic melody could easily have come from one of those Cluster albums we all love so much; and with even the familiar titles sharing more in common with Kolombo than with the Beatles' worst song, this is a pretty great record which, for what it may be worth, pisses all over Switched On flippin' Bach.

Gary Numan - Strange Charm (1986)

 

Rather than merely slipping through the cracks, as tended to happen with Numan's later albums of the decade, I'm not sure this one ever quite made it up through the cracks in the first place. The man himself describes its recording as something of a nightmare amounting to an expensive sounding album reduced to rummaging down the back of the cushions for change. It failed to make much of a dent in either the charts or the lives of anyone who wasn't already tuned in, and so tends to have been generally forgotten even in the recent revival of Numan's fortunes.

Nevertheless it caught me at exactly the right time and place. I was near terminally jobless and accordingly skint, living in a dusty bedsit on a diet of tinned peas, beer, fags, and comic books. I bought records here and there, mostly from the bargain bin if they had anything - which they usually didn't - and this was a quid with only the inner sleeve. I listened to it on a crappy radiogram the bloke from the corner shop had been chucking out, and for better or worse it said a lot more to me about my life than did Morrissey calling for the hanging of a demographic so far beyond my own existence as to be irrelevant. In Praying to the Aliens, Numan reported:

It was a hard album to finish. The career problems created a dreadful atmosphere to write in because it felt like everything I was doing was for nothing... I knew I wanted a dark and dreamy sound for Strange Charm. However, I didn't quite know in which direction I wanted to take my songwriting. I was also running out of things to write about. There were quite a few arguments and the studio atmosphere was unusually tense and bad-tempered.

You can sort of tell, and the record sounds like the work of a man who had painted himself into a corner, which worked for me because this was also what I seemed to have done by that point.

Musically speaking, Numan has never concealed his influences and so we had the Japan album, the Trevor Horn album, the Robert Palmer album to make but three admittedly lazy comparisons. I never quite worked out where Strange Charm might fit in this respect unless it was the Attrition album, sharing a certain mood and sounds with Smiling, At the Hypogonder Club; but it works because said mood - numb desperation concealing emotional turmoil, panic, and general confusion - raises it far above any of the stuff that bothers me about being able to recognise a specific drum machine or anything someone else already did for a wider audience. It's the lyrics and the voice, if you want to call them lyrics, plaintive expressions of longing and regret stripped down to a chilling economy delivered with that voice which, regardless of routine criticisms that tend to miss the point, carries the intent with a sincerity that hurts

This is love.

This is pain disguised as a dream.

It's simple, nothing necessarily profound, and unlikely to convert anyone with tastes aligned to specific haircuts, but this helped me feel a little less like topping myself at the time, as do the other tracks on the record with the possible exception of The Need which seems incongruously jaunty alongside My Breathing, The Sleeproom, and the rest. Should Garrington himself be reading this, which I appreciate is extremely unlikely - dude, it was a long time ago, and you should feel good about this record.