On: [retreat] — S/T
The fear shared by Sam Horton and Lyndon Scarfe is cross-generational. A mutual existential dread at the onset of an increasingly pervasive plexus of information networks and truth distortions found at the grimy underbelly of the global village. [retreat]’s black-tinged dystopia emerges from the northern smokestack of Barnsley, a fitting backdrop for an exercise in desolation.
Precursors to the album include the previous release A Public Witness Program, made up of two approximately 20 minute drone tracks one of which acts as an elegy to Ronald Davis, a rough sleeping Chicagoan whose stoic outlook on his own homelessness was subject to virality and internet appreciation. Other accompaniments involve a sprawling art booklet, press releases that read more along the lines of insurrectionary samizdat than album teaser material, and a two minute short film (w/ jumpscare) by Joe Hannaghan and Ellis Smith entitled The Window featuring the other track on the first record, Flux. Another allegory can be found in the subject matter of the 10-minute short film by Anya Machin and Evie Cook with musical backing also courtesy of [retreat], Prey, which details the stalking of a young woman via unwarranted social media harrassment, using Barnsley as part of a kind of neorealist mise-en-scène to play out the somewhat grander theme of emotional strain as induced by hyperconnectivity (the simplicity of this town has been tainted indeed).
A digression, if you will. Allow me a rudimentary summarisation of the collaborative essence of the participants here - because, not in the interest of making Mr. Scarfe feel older than his years, or rendering Sam as a tot, the convergence of experienced hands and the vigour of youth is the force generating this record.
Sam’s trajectory and presence in the Barnsley (and beyond) music community is 30 or so years junior to his [retreat] counterpart. One common thread between his many appearances is a staunchly anti-authortarian disposition, stemming from early outings with hometown punks The Hurriers, eventually taking his place alongside Ellis Smith in rabid Minutemen-Oh Sees hybrid The Shakamoto Investigation, and more recently trading in jagged garage punk riffs for the wide-eyed jangle pop and jaded stonerly drop-outism of three-piece Regional Creeps whose debut Never Gonna Happen released earlier this year, both of the latter holding shows at the intimate Old №7 stomping grounds, respectively. Sam also operates within a loose collective of musical exploits under the heading ART TNEET records.
The other half of team [retreat] is one Lyndon Scarfe, formerly keyboard player for post-punk group The Danse Society, most notably active in the gothic heyday of the early ‘80s and holding myriad positions for groups like The Black Lamps (whose album is ever-present in the Vinyl Underground record store on Regent Street, and for which he ditched keyboard duties and took up guitar), collaborations with Liam Stewart (also of Black Lamps), an expansive back catalog of cinematic drone experiments, and other scattered curios on now demised Of National Importance records, and probably further activity too obscure for myself personally to name but likely accessible somewhere in the annals of the internet.
Here, the two link up to walk the conceptual tightrope between lunar exploration and a kind of speculative realist nightmare scenario, a monochrome yet otherworldly set of drone abstractions qualified by the progressive electronic sound design. Rather than ascending, [retreat] have intentions to commit to the obverse, to descend into the thick layers which comprise the signal-scrambling machine they seek so desperately to escape. On the opener, the thematic stall is set: the virtual party which allowed individuals the world over to connect, discover and acknowledge each other in total cyber wilderness is over, and the listener has been invited to the hangover, rife with grim realisation. Muffled astronautical voices pierce through static behind a thick wall of crestfallen synths and ringing guitars give way to a gloomy pulsating beat from Boards of Canada’s darkest timeline.
This big gloom continues when Yorkshire’s lunatic answer to Mark E Smith (Sam Batley) wakes from a morphine-addled fever dream on One One One, and with him he brings the hopeless shrieking and narcotically laced poetry of futile attempts to escape a still reeling industrial landscape. Forcefully backed by pounding electro industrial rhythm and screeching, droning guitars, citations of black gold and ancestors dying in toil. An aggressive lamentation closed out with faint dissenting voices — remember, “Oaks is just one”.
Deeper inside the electronic heart of the record is [Esc], a slice of crypto-IDM illustrated as the spasmic ghost of drill and bass rising up in a cloud of black smoke, and the incendiary galactic techno of Three Six Nine. Among the pack are various drone-centric sections, some owing to the brass weavings of Isaac Crawford and Vladimir Vivionski, whose contributions to this cathartic image of atrophy can be heard best on the Toria Garbutt fronted Like Fingerprints which presents a desire to escape from the ensnaring monotony of postmodernity, and to denigrate England to “just a blob”.
Drone emerges here as a multi-referential package on Come With Us, Abstract, Elegia entertaining manifold ideas reaching from post-rock expanses to flitting electronic shimmers. An apocalyptic combo using menacing reverb laden guitar crescendoing and hushing, alongside wave upon surging wave of electronic exploration, and if Scarfe’s history with The Danse Society needs reference for meditative bleakness — debut Seduction contained a cover of In Heaven (Everything Is Fine) as famously sung by the Lady in the Radiator on David Lynch’s 1977 black and white surrealist horror Eraserhead and blown up to over seven minutes using Scarfe’s experimental synth tones as a backbone, a theme which continues into the self titled debut from [retreat].
As many reluctantly stare from the cliffedge of the 2010s and away into the chasmic and uncertain void of the new decade of potentially socially mutating technologies forming ahead, [retreat] is thorough in its portrayal of the tension and apprehension that accompanies gazing tentatively forwards into a new epoch. An epoch which may possibly require spacecraft to escape from, or more attainably, down here on the ground, a grassroots resistance to media consumption and market-driven irreality that starts from the decidedly real homefront of the inglorious British town-as-stronghold.
Listen here: https://retreat-music.bandcamp.com/album/retreat
