Review: Goves - A Creche For The Lonely And Peculiar

Even the very first sound on A Creche For The Lonely And Peculiar treads an ambiguous line between an organic, real-word tangibility and the abstract realms of electronics: is it the amplified scrape of a thin nail on a dry wall perhaps, or maybe just static modulated and reshaped? Such an uncertainty is continued as the layers begin to stack up – I find myself constantly re-evaluating my own mental images as each new textures unhinges the existing soundscape, like a shape constantly tilted on its axis to bring drastically different perspectives through the change in orientation.

The sounds a of bustling train station (train breaks, echoing public chatter) become enveloped by warm bubbles of electronics and the croak of cyber toads, which in turn becomes haunted by the hiss of traffic heard behind a squeaky metal gate; the real world becomes a backdrop for the imaginary, then the imaginary becomes a backdrop for the real world. The electronics solidify from bubbles to chimes, clanging in mysterious sequences while a slight wisp of choral voices surges up and down. Sometimes it sounds like a techno record reduced to ambient rubble; at other points it feels like a physical landscape with Goves’ grubby synthesiser fingerprints all over it; at other points it’s a awkward love story between a mournful, plain-speaking cello and the soft pillows of electronic tone that brush alongside it.

Such evasion of clear comprehension means that I’m in a constant state of stimulation, my brain working on overdrive as the tiny tweaks of sound send earthquakes through the colours and shapes of my imagination. Things don’t get any easier as Laurie Tompkins sharpens the edges of Goves’ tonal clouds for his remix of “Victoria To Maidstone” – the haze suddenly becomes clinically clear and bright to the point of harsh, yet no clearer in terms of its ease of understanding, with an agitated fizz of interference and high-end bleeps of fax communication fidgeting around operatic voices that rise fountain-like up through the middle.