Spectral and Eerie offering from Pye Corner Audio - Prowler Album Reviewed by SongBlog

Martin Jenkins aka Our Head Technician aka Pye Corner Audio has offered up his latest haunted composition, Prowler.

Inspired by 1970's Public Information Films, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream, he has been weaving sounds and textures to create electronic, lo-fi sci-fi soundtracks for over five years. These are minimal and textural symphonies with a pastoral spookiness.

Prowler is a slight departure. The analogue sound is still there but it has been channelled into the murkier corners of slow-reveal, minimal ambient techno.

Opening with After Dark, it is shadowy and quiet with slight warping and distortion. The atmosphere is still one of eeriness but the slight acid-tinged analogue synth lead gives it a 90s post-club vibe.

She Hunts at Night could have come from Future Sound of London's album Expander with pinging synths laid over growling bass and softened by spacy washed synths.

Something Happened and Before Dawn spiral us down into darker territory as a well-space of alien sounds echo and bounce off shimmering sonic waterfalls, slowly warping and bending as light would through a prism. It is pure ambience and witch drums flowing through and out of flickering perception.

Title track Prowler seeps, oozes and coils with hellionic menace. Dark corridors of pulsing shadows and twitching shapes populate this forest of sighs.

Decade Counter continues the journey into the smothering night. Sinewaves howl and screech over a stark moog bass, unsettling, basement dwelling creatures of Lovecraftian lore pulsing with whispered augur.

Morning closes out what is a collection of eerie and foreboding transmissions seemingly beamed directly from the lower echelons of Dante’s seven levels of hell.

Prowler seems to exist in that hypnagogic state of consciousness, the phase of lucid dreaming, visions of half-sleep. Submit yourself and allow the smoky tendrils of Pye Corner Audio's latest offering transport you to the netherworld of black forests and labyrinthine tunnels.