Platform - Lovelorn EP

This June sees the release of two new discs by label owner Matthew Atkins on Minimal Resource Manipulation.  Probably his most personal and emotive music to date, these tracks were recorded during a period of great personal and emotional upheaval wherein the label itself was put on ice for a number of months.

‘Lovelorn’ is classic Platform, where stripped back beats mesh and collide over simple, haunting fragments of melody and shards of disembodied found sound. Over the space of five fragile and delicate tracks, ‘Lovelorn’ takes us on a real journey through minimalist house, glitch techno and abstracted electronica, with its heart on its sleeve at all points therein, the soulful core of the music radiating from beneath the icy surfaces of the mix. It’s like listening to robots with broken hearts weeping together in automated unison.

‘Hiatus’ is a different beast altogether. The first release under Atkins’ own name is a reflection of the personal nature of this full length album. ‘Hiatus’ represents an ending and a beginning, the stripping away of memories past in order to find a point from where to move off again. The music here is pared down to a series of blurred and smudged drones, with all surface detail obliterated by layers and layers of deep reverb. This reductivist approach is also represented by the artwork encasing the disc, a blank canvas from which the sounds within can slowly emerge to envelop the listener in its luminous fog. Placed in the same ballpark as Celer or William Basinski, ‘Hiatus’ is an isolationist drift towards the darker end of the drone spectrum.

Be the first to review this record. Best reviewer each month gets £10 off their next order!