From its humble beginnings in the relatively insular tape world to remixing and touring with Mogwai, soundtracking Adam Curtis and plenty more high-profile co-signs, Pye Corner Audio is not the furtive secret it once was, and Jenkins never had to adapt his project to meet a broader audience. It would be hard to picture anyone conjuring this abstract but oh so rich sense as effectively as Jenkins has, which goes some way to explain the popularity of his project. In truth, the retro-fetishism tag is a slight stretch for Pye Corner Audio as it’s not explicitly retreading old ground, but rather evoking a sense of past times. Handily, Spanish label Lapsus pulled together a comprehensive retrospective of Jenkins’ earlier retro-fetishistic ruminations last year as the Black Mill Tapes (10th Anniversary Box), which helps accentuate where Pye Corner has progressed over the past decade. Ut it would be lazy to consider Pye Corner Audio as a static venture lingering on one creative tract, and the most recent run of albums on Ghost Box serve as testament to that.
Globular analogue synth lines reliably cast into a pervasive gloom – a gloom which evokes a peculiarly olde worlde Britishness in one of the most acute realisations of the hauntology aesthetic. In terms of mood and sonics, there isn’t a great deal of distance between the earliest Black Mill Tapes releases and his latest works. The evolution of Martin Jenkins’ Pye Corner Audio project has been subtle but steady. Pye Corner Audio – Entangled Routes (Ghost Box)
A rather ghostly round up of new year LPs from our team of writers