Charles Vaughan - Documenting The Decay

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5...according to our Phil on Thu 13 Oct, 2011.

Here's a CD on the Epic 45 curated Wayside & Woodland label. As ever it looks lovely, housed in a brown digipack job and it's all handmade with things stuck on the sleeve, hand stamped goodness and there's a plethora of free bits of card inside with black and white pics of the countryside. I don't know much about this chap aside from he's been listed in the credits of the last few Epic 45 releases so I expect he's played somewhere or other on 'em. Musically it's an odd blend of pastoral ambient drone which works well. In fact it reminds me of Persistent Repetitions by the Caretaker at moments. It has a nostalgic feel coupled with a losing your memory/ marbles feel. So essentially it's a very subtle album drenched in a hazy amnesia. There's plenty of twinkles in there as well for those who need the twinkle. The closing track is somewhat of an anomaly with its wonky acoustic guitar, wonky piano, scratched record noises, gentle percussion before it develops into a more familiar warm sounding hum. I've just listened to this from start to end and I'm already planning when I'm gonna play it next which is usually a good sign. Nice work!

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Finally, the debut from Charles Vaughan is with us. Ever since the mysterious arrival of the 'April15th' EP back in 2007, this album has been rumoured, along with a host of other slowly gestating projects which will all, hopefully, see the light of day on Wayside & Woodland Records, sometime in the future.

So, who is Charles Vaughan? Some may know him as the figure from the popular 70s science fiction show 'Survivors', a character who dedicates himself to documenting , cataloguing and indexing what's left of civilisation after a plague has wiped out 99% of the population. This was surely the inspiration on the musician behind the crumbling, mildewed sound-scapes to be found on 'Documenting The Decay'.

Some may also recognise his name from recent releases by the band epic45, his presence and involvement growing from a thankyou in the sleeve notes, to 'production assistance' to full blown musical contributions on the band's latest album 'Weathering'. There are even whispers on the wind that he may even be a member of the band, an alter ego, but those claims can not be confirmed...

The music here, as mentioned above, is a collection of tape distressed instrumentals, mainly played on ancient synths, piano, old broken vinyl and the odd detuned zither. A copy recently found it's way to the influential writer Simon Reynolds who wrote about it in a article on how 'Hauntology' (a term he himself coined) is far from dead, indeed, it is very much still 'undead'. It's safe to say that the music contained on the album could fit into that category, with it's evocations of a future that never was, redundant technology left to rot and fading memories of post-war optimism.

Musical reference points could include the work of William Basinski, Aphex Twin's ambience, Eno and The Caretaker. But Charles Vaughan has very much carved out a peculiarly isolated area of his own, a strange, mouldy, spore marked environment in which he continues to produce these documents....

Wildly said:

Superb Album!

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