Bearer - Praxis

If only we still had a music press we'd have a name for this kind of thing. In its absence you'll have to make do with the nonsense pouring from my mouth. So then, how to describe what Bristol's Bearer are up to? Praxis is something approaching their third or fourth release, this time debuting for ANA, tellingly a label with a liking for off-centred/time-dilated/subterraneous electronic musings, and this ambitious two LP set is by some way Bearer's most unapologetically singular contribution to date. You get four full sides of under-soil expulsions, haunted guitar abstractions and dub-aligned rituals that sit between the walls of consciousness, purgatorial sound that's not quite made its way in from the next room. Something like, but crucially not quite, Shackleton at this most refracted, Labradford's isolationist period, or, probably most appropriately, a picking up of the baton Kye discarded a while back - think that first Helm LP, Vanessa Rossetto, Lambkin himself of course. It's a lonely old sound, old being the operative word, dredged from some ancient depths where you probably best not venture or transmitted through one of those portals Lovecraft opened on the Holloway Rd and sent floating and scheming up the M32. Murky, psychoactive unspoolings without centre and possibly charged with sinister purpose. Listen under the cover of night. No need to lock the doors. No-one's visiting. Let's call it improvrished and move on to the next.