If you like to see happy-go-lucky skeletons bustin’ some sweet moves to squirming psychedelic synth jams on a pulsating cosmic dancefloor then step right up and feast your eyes and ears on Yin Wrong’s charming animated video for ‘Whorl’. A recent 7″ release that sold out in minutes ‘Whorl’ is also the second track on Polypores‘ new album Cosmically A Shambles providing a perfect introduction to its subtle change in sound towards something a little more rhythmic and direct, a little less abstract and drifting than his previous work.
Polypores is the project of Preston’s Stephen Buckley, who I’m surprised to note has been at this a decade now since his releases on Concréte Tapes, in that time he’s put out a run of impressive albums on Castles in Space and earned a formidable live reputation. If you’re a fan of modular synthesis and he’s somehow slipped under your radar, get stuck in.
Cosmically A Shambles is playful and brightly coloured with a very tactile handmade feel to it. It is splendidly plastic, both in the sense of the smooth electrical artificiality of the sound and the way he stretches and contorts it like sonic play doh, pushing it through moulds and bending it back on itself. The occasional analogue clunkiness only adding to its made-in-my-shed charms. There’s a purity in his approach, undoubtedly you could call some of the tones and textures here retro but where it’s common for artists to use that to evoke certain decades or moods the tunes here seem unconcerned with the wider world, absorbed instead by their own possibilities.
Rather than a static beat grid to build off the greater use of rhythm follows this wayward muse, ‘Spoonbender’ is nudged along by handclaps ascending into the cloud of bleep. The brief minute of ‘Mystery Energy Score’ wriggles and pops somewhere between old skool electro and 8 bit game tunes leading into the fighting rhythm patterns that begin ‘Untethered (Ascend Now)’ skittering across each other and hitting a juddering breakdown before settling into something steadier, eventually winding down to a stop. ‘Lossy’ is softer, with more of the lush feel of some of his earlier stuff, washed out and melting, it has those sunset and sci-fi vibes.
The sleeve art by Kazland paints him as a wizard in his own mysterious world of colourful shapes and creatures, it seems to match the album’s whimsical mood. If the idea of being Cosmically A Shambles hadn’t tipped you off that Buckley wasn’t taking things too seriously then titles like ‘Timeless Spirals Of The Motherfungus’ should probably give the game away. Not that the music itself is silly. It has, well, spiralling patterns that overlay like minimalist tuned percussion. On the closing ‘Hazyday’ a ticking head-nod groove, bubbling synth and some odd background growls set the stage for Buckley to cut loose with a wild and wandering synth line jazz solo. A little cosmic, a little shambolic but mostly an album in love with the limitless joy of sound.
