Foster Neville The Edge Of Destruction
Vinyl Catalogue Number: SUBEX00126
Download Catalogue Number: SUBEX00127
General Release Date: 23/06/2023
"splendid ambient album.. disquieting vintage weirdness"
Bob Fischer - Electronic Sound review
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The Edge of Destruction’ is the debut album from Durham-based artist Foster Neville. 19th century German poetry, the theories of Prince Matila Costiesco Ghyka, and fellow Northerner Basil Bunting’s long poem ‘Briggflatts’, together with the architecture of Le Corbusier (especially the Modulor), are the reference points for the techniques employed on this new release.
Influenced by the early methods of Brian Eno it sounds as if it might be generative but it isn’t. There is a total rejection of the loop; instead the album develops an evocative language of its own, one which attempts to revive some of our earliest pulses as sentient beings but also one that is more suitable for the shifting structures of the dying stages of the second Elizabethan age.
The title is an appreciative nod towards Doctor Who, in particular the third serial broadcast in 1964. The tracks progressively map out a collective narrative of threat and survival in a strange and uncertain world, with a strong folk horror element running through - as titles like ‘Hookland’ and ‘The Devil’s Arrows’ suggest.
The human voice is absent from all but one of the album’s tracks, appropriately enough the title track, and those enumerations are like a countdown to some unstated and yet imminent disaster and are in Chinese (spoken by Wang Tiao) as if to demonstrate even further alienation (for English speakers at least) from the information which language would conventionally carry.
Blending analogue, electronic and acoustic sounds, the album’s dark romanticism and gothic qualities are evident in the way familiar sounds are mixed with the more exotic and treated, and primitive elements have been combined with the melodic. The aim was to present a sonically rich journey and one which it is pleasant to immerse yourself in, rather than the more avant-garde sounds the processes drawn from poetry and architecture might imply.
The album is produced by John Pilgrim, a member of the inner sanctum of the Folk Horror Revival and whose approach to production is shaped by his longstanding interest in dislocated memories and unsettled landscapes.
releases June 23, 2023
Written and performed by Foster Neville
Production and original artwork by John Pilgrim
Remastereing and additional design by Dan Seville
Voice on “The Edge of Destruction” by Wang Tiao
Originally a cassette release on Bibliotapes
thedarkoutside.bandcamp.com/merch/foster-neville-the-edge-of-destruction
This double vinyl repress has been rerecorded, extended, remastered and redesigned
