Crackle - Heavy Water

CRACKLE is an off-kilter collaboration between bass player Nick Doyne-Ditmas and drummer Frank Byng, that draws on their extensive experience as musicians and producers. Through a series of studio experiments and improvisations the duo reference a wide range of traditions and practices, moving between analog and digital, acoustic and electric, lo-fi and hi-fi. Theirs is a musical blog about the cross-cultural traffic of south London, a soundtrack to the highways and byways of a discombobulated city.

Loosely inspired by the post-drop out novel Stone Junction by Jim Dodge, Heavy Water steals a glimpse at the toxic monstrosities brewing in pop's occult laboratory - the dark and dangerous world music constrained beneath its bubblegum smile. Elegiac cornet and haunting melodica sound a thematic last post over a seething rhythmic morass, and conjure premonitions of an imminent crash landing.

Starting from the drums and bass, CRACKLE deploy an unconventional arsenal of analog vs digital instruments, strange treatments, close miking, forced processes, chance and accident, as techniques to unlock something both strange and familiar. Details are amplified, spaces are filled and emptied, surfaces are polished or tarnished, unstable elements are left to react.


The result is a low-end excursion into the cracks between dub, electronica, future-past world sounds and freer jazz imaginings. Although one can hear echoes of the strategies of Eno, the obliqueness of Perry, the widescreen of Morriconi and the free-spirit and musicality of Codona, Heavy Water maps its own trajectory to create an album that is impossible to pigeonhole

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