Amp here with Echoesfromtheholocene (AMPBASE AMP030) – someone in the promotion department has kindly seen fit to send me the luxury “fine art” CD edition of this item which has a hand-made cover and a watercolour artwork inserted, which retails for around 30 bones from their Bandcamp page. True fans can spend even more money on a limited lathe-cut double LP, which will be made to order as soon as you click that button.
I never heard Amp in the 1990s when they started, but they’re part of that same lineage in Bristol UK that gave us Flying Saucer Attack, Third Eye Foundation, and Movietone, and like some of these bands Amp have been tagged “post-rock” and “shoegaze” by listeners, perhaps attempting to express the somewhat ethereal nature of this music. Personnel-wise, today’s release is mostly the work of Richard F. Walker who plays various guitars and synths fed through effects, but we also have the vocal work of French singer Karine Charff, who joined Amp in 1992. Other musicians have passed through the ranks of Amp over time and even their current incarnation, they say, depends on “a succession of floating collaborators.” They use the word “floating” advisedly. Echoesfromtheholocene isn’t necessarily winning me over to the Amp universe, but at least on today’s spin I’m finding a way in to a record that initially struck me as rather wispy and directionless, mannered mood music for a post-modern listener with ironic, jaded ears. It’s clearer today that those aspects I might regard as “inconclusive” in the music of Amp are in fact a core part of its appeal, and these rootless, shapeless tunes are intended to drift in and drift out of our awareness as surely as a passing sailing ship dips over the horizon, as insubstantial as a fading dream.
Underpinning the record is an ecological message of despair; in it, the world has already been destroyed, despoiled, ravaged by greed, capitalism, and all the other unwanted forces consuming our natural resources, and now all we’re doing is looking helplessly at the wreckage left behind. In fact, it’s not even us doing the looking, but rather some sentient visitors from another planet. The whole record thus amounts to an incredibly bleak vision, but somehow Amp manage to find a stark beauty within it. Interestingly, for an album with a “message”, the vocal component is rather subdued in the mix; Charff may be delivering a stern warning as much as she is singing in her unique free-flowing manner that pays scant attention to conventional musical structure or root notes, but the lyrical content is sometimes rather hard to make out. Released 3 March 2023.