James McKeown, the musical wizard behind Hawksmoor, travels in historied musical backroads. The sounds he creates and puts together on records like Methods Of Dreaming, On Prescription, Telepathic Heights, and Oneironautics feel like lost treasures of the past. Bringing to mind everyone from Pink Floyd to Kraftwerk to Cluster to Alan Parsons. He works in the electronic realm, but with his use of electric bass and guitar the music is given a proper doorway that invites even classic rock listeners to come and sit a spell. So this can appeal to both your uncle that saw Floyd at Madison Square Garden in ’75, plus the other uncle that saw Tangerine Dream at an abandoned church in Munich in ’73.
On his latest release, out today via Lunar Module, is a musical journey into fidelity degradation by way of analog tape. An Aesthetic – Experiments in Tape is a sound world fuzzy and gauzy, compositions disintegrating before our ears. Dreamy melodies echo on in a chasm of time itself; songs and motifs muddied from the rust and wear of years passing, building to infinity. Experiments in tape, but also an exploration of things breaking down to their elemental parts. What things? All things, least of all us.
On the surface, the latest from Hawksmoor sounds like waking from anesthesia. That cotton-y, gauzy haze of coming to from a long stretch of unconsciousness. The outside world slowly making its way into your head through distant voices, movement, and whispered consolations attempting to rouse you from that dead/not dead sleep. These sound experiments, ten in all and named “Aesthetic I” through “Aesthetic X” feel less like songs and more like portals to another frame of mind. A peek through the looking glass, but a looking glass dirtied and muddied through years and centuries of long views and quiet moments.
But for me this is less an experiment and more some existential musical trip into exploring the overall degradation of us all. Happiness, sadness, anger, war, peace, antagonization between people and beliefs, and the slow decay of the planet this is all happening on. It’s this musical macro view, from the big bang to the eventual implosion that will erase everything that came before.
The music on An Aesthetic – Experiments in Tape is engaging and mysterious. Melody covered in hiss and distortion, feeling as if it’s fighting for your attention as it comes apart in the moment. If I were to choose one of these for you to dip into first I’d say “Aesthetic IV”. It sounds like a calliope fizzing and melting in an acid bath, still sounding upbeat and optimistic as it reverts to its elemental parts. The tape slows and a feeling of unease comes over you. Each of these tracks have unique and singular moments like this, and if you let them really get into your head you can find a kind of humanity in it all. It’s music, but it’s also a template for time passing and the breaking down of everything around us.
An Aesthetic – Experiments in Tape is a different kind of listen. It’s a more personal, intimate and ethereal trip Hawksmoor has created for us. You can indeed enjoy it as a sound experiment and on that level it’s great. But dig a little deeper and open your brain a bit and this may be one of the headiest listens you’ll find this year.
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