The Telescopes
Experimental Health
UK COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR303CD (2024)
Another great set of songs from this UK act which, on this occasion at least, was performed and recorded entirely by one disaffected fellow, Stephen Lawrie. He did it all with his cheap synths and “broken toys”, operating from his home in West Yorkshire.
The label are quick to point out the “zero guitars” ethos in operation here, and perhaps in the minds of the label curators this helps to align The Telescopes with certain strains of electronic music which we know they like – e.g. Coil, Psychic TV, and Martyn Ware. But Lawrie has an old-fashioned rock fixation that doesn’t overlap neatly with those dark-disco and mutant funkoid types, he also sings, and as we noted re 2019’s Stone Tape album, he can naturally slide into a Velvet Underground groove with ease and enthusiasm, for instance on ‘Leave Nobody Behind’. With Stone Tape, I sent myself on a wild goose chase – or ghost chase – looking for hauntology themes that probably weren’t there, while today’s record instead contains dark hints about the physicality of death and disease, faced head-on in Lawrie’s no-nonsense manner. You get the feeling he could stare down the Grim Reaper in a duel at fifty paces, leaving old “Mr Bones” a quivering wreck.
Other listeners may simply savour the very raw distorted textures that emerge from our man’s lo-fi set-up, which compel us to stir our stumps in a dance of the dead just as surely as the mesmerising repetitions, intense organ drones, and relentless nature of these performances – plenty of repeated chants, simple lyrics, and staying on a steady course with a core of iron on board the yacht of steel he uses to glide across the oceans of acid. This release includes remixed versions by Black Market Karma (Sten Belton, a London-based devotee of psychedelic fuzz guitar) and the unknown Mosaic Runes. Black Market Karma does add a lot to ‘Leave Nobody Behind’ with his guitar breaks and live drums, but maybe he adds too much; listening to his mix, already I miss the simplicity and insistent quality of solo Lawrie, and this just sounds like any Bevis Frond track (although the wobble effect on the vocal does add a nifty lysergic touch worthy of Sun Dial). The Mosaic Runes take on ‘45E’ is a real spooker, though – isolating elements from the original track in a dubby manner, he succeeds in exposing some of the real damaged voices of instruments, which might otherwise be concealed under layers of nasty fuzz. From 15th Jan 2024.