Cassette
Having shared space on a 2021 cassette released via Moremars, Matthew Hopkins and Alexandra Spence unite for the first time under the name Banana for a four song suite of quietly unsettling minimal noise, musique concrete & improv. Since it's on Infant Tree, the label operated by Malvern Brume's Rory Salter, i'm not gonna get too far without uttering the words 'liminal spaces', and if Hopkins and Spence are imagining any kind of world then i'd estimate it's certainly one situated after hours and has some kind of relationship with the nocturnal. Are we dreaming? Are we awake? What can we not see? The strange confluence of whistling wind, indescriptable scrapes and originless voices is certainly a dreamlike concoction, the kind of transmission you might find caught between radio signals, ghosts in the static, edging you towards consciousness but making you doubt it all the same. Gave me that same uneasy feeling as Anti-Clock or the DIY concrete horror landscape of Samutek's Muzeum Historii Naturalnej, records i'm still bending my head around multiple months after the fact. Some Kind of Telling, as its title might suggest, proves equally confounding and portentuous.