Recorded over eleven days in a decommissioned data hall with the cooling still running, 'Half Light' is the most detailed headphone record of the year and completely useless on a motorway. Both facts come from the same decision.
A band who will not play a room licensed for more than two hundred people made a record in a rehearsal space with a 2.3 metre ceiling. The rule is not marketing attached to the album. It is how the album was built.
Eleven tracks built from the way a club sounds once everyone has gone home. The kick keeps walking out of the room and the reverb keeps the whole thing standing up.
Nine nursery melodies sung into the concrete rooms of a 1968 tower block. The title gives away the concept and hides the actual subject, which is what it costs to love a building everyone else has agreed to find ugly.
Twelve people, one deconsecrated chapel and about forty contact mics. Moth Choir have made an album whose loudest event is a chair leg, and turned dynamic range into an argument about who gets to decide how loud your life is.
Nineteen months, six shopping centres in their last weeks of trading, and a 62 Hz escalator motor doing the job of a bass player. Field recording usually gets away with pointing a microphone at somewhere interesting. This record actually composes.
A tape company made an album on its own stock, on a four-track, to prove a point. It proves two: that tape does something real, and that it lets you get away with things you should not get away with.
Ten pop songs written on a 1981 polysynth that goes out of tune as it warms up. Nadia Volt sequenced the album by temperature and kept the takes where the machine wins.
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