Trevor Mathison - From Signal to Decay: Volume 5

Chain Reaction associate and sound designer/film maker, Trevor Mathison, pops up again on Purge again for another edition in the confusingly numbered From Signal To Decay series - Purge issued Vol 2 around this time last year, and where 3 and 4 appeared in order to now get us to 5, i'm not sure. These two long form pieces are derived from exhibitions held in both London and Brussels, though work remarkably effectively as standalone pieces removed from any image-based context. It's testament to the highly textured nature of Mathison's compositional skill, a hallucinogenic compounding of minimal industrial, drone and dub aesthetics ala Sandwell District, Raime, Porter Ricks with a significant emphasis on the psycho-trophic/geographic. We have other terms to describe this kind of music making - hauntological, time-dilated et al - but let's not codify Mathison's practice too much, especially given how supple and shifting this music can be, moving seamlessly between the ethereal and impressionistic to something much more punchy and direct, especially in the final parts of the second side. There's a lot of detail in these pieces, a vertical, unflattening of electronic music history in that K-Punk endorsed kinda way, and with it a good summation of Mathison's decades long experiments with sound, image and open-ended narrative. A not-to-be-missed (though inevitably will be) highly limited 180gm pressing, with all of the usual Purge attention to presentation.