Cassette
"Pataphysical’s Matthew Linares debuts his Hidden Rung project for Good Morning Tapes with a beautiful 35 minute spiral into tripped-out ambient and narrative wooze, somewhere between classic 12th Isle, Current 93 x Blue Jam styles.
Leading on from last year’s Pataphysical album ‘Hapticality’, this new work ventures into more surrealist zones that manifest Linares’s thoughts on ambient experimentalism. It relates to his organisation of interactive sound installations in forests and other weird/abandoned locales around the UK, where he guides his audience, often blindfolded, to explore psychedelic paths that extend beyond the prosaic.
Working in the conceptual space between ambient as background music and atmospheric presence, Hidden Rung’s ‘Happier’ prizes the form’s shapeshifting nature and ability to both consciously, and unwittingly stimulate the senses, operating at a level of nuance that really gets under the skin and prompts peculiar responses over return listens.
Between the piano lines of ‘Cascasia’ and spangled, Current 93-like monologue of its closing title tune, Linares acts as shamanistic psychopomp, guiding searching souls from the voices-in-your-head mulch of ‘Another You’ to sublimely groggy states in ‘Phling’, and the lysergic deliquescence of ‘Peach Orielle’.
Tripped out bliss from the go-to label in this realm.
