Trevor Mathison - From Signal to Decay: Volume 2

Chain Reaction alumni (as one third of Hallucinator) and Black Audio Film Collective founding member, Trevor Mathison, finally releases his 30-years-in-the-making debut record, the misleadingly-titled From Signal to Decay: Vol. 2. A multi-disciplinary artist, Mathison's been kept more than busy over that period with his other celebrated pursuits (i'd recommend taking a dig around on his website for further insight), though From Signal to Decay suggests art/film's gain is music's loss. As you might expect given his other interests, this is electronic music making with a cinematic/visual bent, hallucinatory and haunting, and like his films, washed in greyscale. There's also clear pointers back to the Chain Reaction history, Mathison coating industrial klang in a dubby, ambient gauze, a trick that only adds to the time-dilated feel. And it's not just an aesthetic quality, either, since much of these compositions are re-purposed and re-interpreted from Mathison's archives - the past inside the present and all that. Mark Fisher, allegedly a huge fan, might have labeled this hauntological, which i've no issue with, though that might undersell how punchy and arresting the collection is as a whole. Moe signal than decay, Mathison feels vital right now. Classic limited Purge edition of 250.