AUTOMAT/EAST CENTRAL ONE EPS
(HOLLOW EARTH)
Sometime FACT contributor Woebot, real name Matt Ingram, was one of the most inspirational, spiky and madly ambitious music bloggers ever up until his "retirement" at the beginning of this year (seriously, check out his post on The 100 Greatest Records Ever if you’ve not done so before). A co-founder of the still-going Dissensus forum, and the brains behind the short-lived and sorely missed Woebot.tv video podcast series, Ingram is that rare thing: a tastemaker with imagination, integrity and, above all, really fucking good taste.
Woebot always seems to be one step ahead of the internet hordes, but he also has a keen interest in the past, particularly that of his hometown, London. You can detect the influence of both Peter Ackroyd’s psychogeographic ponderings and Ghost Box’s audio-visual hauntology on East Central One and Automat – two EPs which represent his first serious forays into music-making. Automat was inspired by the architecture and local history of St Brides Church, Fleet Street, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and according to legend provided the basis for the, er, wedding cake. As Woebot himself notes, St Brides also has historic connections to print – indeed, the sleeve art for both EPs was printed using the 1820 Hopkinson Albion Press at St Brides Library. The music evokes an oneiric London in which past, present and future co-exist – the very London perceived by William Gull in From Hell. Delicate tonal shifts, disarmingly low frequencies and chirruping samples evocative of (and perhaps sourced from?) this historically pregnant area of London seep together, recalling The Caretaker at his most wistful.
The East Central One EP charts similar terrain: its cover depicts St Luke’s, one of the infamous Hawksmoor churches in which Masonic and pagan symbols are reputedly encoded. Opening track ‘Bunhill’ refers to nearby Bunhill Fields, an area indelibly associated with London dissenters and visionaries – most famously William Blake, who is buried there. Fittingly, the track begins with a looped line from Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ ("When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears"), setting it to a fractured, Shackleton-on-Mordant Music-style dub rhythm. On the tracks that follow – ‘Chillblains’, ‘Salami’ and ‘Flapper’, spectral traces of junglist breaks and spoken incitations to rave coalesce in a fug of pseudo-occult ambience. East Central One is a séance with a sense place and, perhaps more importanly, a sense of humour.
Rating: 7.5 / Marie Jane Kelly
