The debut album from a collaboration between Front & Follow/Gated Canal Radio’s Justin Watson and Rob Spencer, alongside Simon Proffitt (Cahn Ingold Prelog, The Master Musicians Of Dyffryn Moor) captures the tension of a collapsing world.
Evoking the spirit of Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Before The Magic’ is a dense, sonic sculpture layered with field recordings, samples and random noise, collected and then manipulated in the studio. Despite the almost accidental nature of the source sounds, this production is anything but random.
While The Incidental Crack makes serious soundscapes they don’t take themselves too seriously. There’s a dark humour at work, reminiscent of Chris Morris’ ‘Blue Jam’ radio show, dotted between the child’s voices, sounds of traffic and crackles of life as illustrated on ‘We All Feel Happier Now’, a one-sided conversation about the concept of caves meanders over cavernous drones and dark synth stabs.
Knowingly winking in the face of adversity, it’s uneasy listening for an uneasy world.
