Jane Arden & Jack Bond - Anti-Clock

"This is my anxiety survival broadcast"
If, like me, Low Company's issuing of the Anti-Clock soundtrack is your first introduction to the film (which, honestly, there's no shame in - it was only ever officially screened twice in the UK, though BEB fans may have caught it at the ICA), you might need more than a minute to get your head around it. This is dense and confusing post-Ballardian existential sci-fi that shows a hell of a lot, but tells very little. Nonetheless, such is the collaged presentation of austere dialogue and chanson-like lullaby, you might not ever actually need to watch the film (if you can, indeed, find it). This, for me, doesn't simply function in the way most soundtracks would - as in service to a wider visual presentation - but serves as a discrete document/experience in itself, an oblique critique of technology and the depressive state of western civilisation, and in that sense a strange contemporaneous sister to, say, Threads or Throbbing Gristle. Which makes sense, because this has been purposefully edited together after the fact. Arden's songs that open each side are beautiful and hypnotic, and are most likely the main appeal here, but it's the time-frazzled overlaying of psycho-exploration dialogue, dream-state guitar and non-descript television/radio broadcasts that truly drew me in. I keep coming back just trying to understand. "History is already a foregone conclusion. But i am always too late to understand it" Hand-numbered edition of 250. And maybe the definitive Low Company release.