(((O))) : Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan – Public Works and Utilities

The sixth full length report from Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan directs its attention to the matter of Public Works and Utilities. Once again offering commentary in the form of lucid and evocative synthscapes.

It is undoubtedly an unusual quest to try and reveal the hidden romance of public utilities and national infrastructure through instrumental electronic music, but it’s one which continues to deliver delightful results. Invigorated perhaps by an increasingly busy live schedule WRNTDP succeeds in delivering more of what you know and love from the earlier albums and enough new twists and turns to keep things interesting and moving forwards.

Coming in like incidental music at first ‘Swift Safe and Comfortable’ opens softly, settling into a steady pulse and gradually turning up the intensity as it insists upon your attention. It feels like it’s setting us up for something more robust but the early run of the album is actually quite drifting and melancholic. ‘Sunset Over Stanlow’ glides and twinkles with the fading light and slowing of the day, while ‘Water Treatment Works’ has a deserted night-time feel, calm and empty, at least for now. Things take a more upbeat swing on ‘Renewal and Regeneration’ which is brighter and busier, charged with the hope of building a better future through city planning and public services.

The emotional beats range from this utopian futurism to regret at all that has been lost. The project is extraordinarily well defined and presented, from the name that sounds like a faceless committee, through artwork that recalls indigestible 70s textbooks and track titles ranging from municipal slogans to functional descriptors. Within this neatly established (concrete) box, and considering the subject matter, you might imagine the music to be earnest or didactic, perhaps even cold and difficult, but it is flowing and evocative, cinematic even.

The link between the subject and the sound is perhaps the weakest, relying on nostalgic connections to an earlier set of cultural signifiers. I’m under the impression he restricts the sound palette to be ‘of the time’ but he does so with a light touch, it’s not thickly slathered with the blatantly dated sonics and heavy retro signposts that some other artists deploy. There’s a fine balance allowing it to feel modern which, after all, was a driving motivation of the projects it celebrates.

Consider also the bone dry wit that calls a piece of moody electronica ‘Water Treatment Works’. My God, the glamour! Or maybe just cold eyed fury. In recent years the scandal of raw sewage being endlessly dumped into our rivers has become a background constant because the UK privatised its water supply and deregulated it enough that companies would rather face fines than fix it. By any measure, this is insanity, clean water is a matter of public health and yet its ubiquity is so taken for granted that we forget it needs attending to. The world built by post war optimism and determination has been so thoroughly downgraded and dismissed that as that war slips out of living memory we’re now facing not merely the crumbling of national infrastructure but the return of actual fucking Nazis.

Anger about this decline or abandonment of the post war consensus is what animates Warrington-Runcorn, combined with the imminent necessity of people grasping what has been lost. The second half of the album is taken up by ‘The People Matter’ a marvellous widescreen epic that calls to mind a combination of John Carpenter themes and Orbital’s ‘The Box’. Among the most ambitious things he’s done it wears its eighteen minute run time lightly and is graced with a vocal sample outlining how “the town is being built for people and we’ve got to keep their needs absolutely in the forefront of our thinking all the time”. This central idea, as impulse and organising principle, in the ways it has failed and been neglected, alongside a hope its better instincts might be revived, continue to provide a rich seam of possibility.