January Album of the Month
Craven Faults
Erratics & Unconformities
(Leaf)
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Erratics and Unconformities is the first album by Craven Faults. It follows three EPs: Netherfield Works, Springhead Works and Nunroyd Works. Long-form analogue electronic journeys across decades and continents, and swathes of post-industrial northern Britain.
The journey on Erratics and Unconformities picks up where Netherfield Works left off. We take the canal towpath out of the city. We fork north shortly afterwards. Is this where it started? The terrain gradually becomes more rugged. Familiar. Wild. Evidence of human activity is less immediate in this glacial landscape. It’s there if you seek it. But easy to ignore. If you listen carefully, you can still hear the weight of the ice-sheet carving its way through the rock.
Everything in its own time. The output from the old textile mill Craven Faults calls home is no longer as linear as it once was. There was no clear start point for the project, rather simply rediscovering the joy in experimentation with no material goals. Some of the recordings that make up Erratics and Unconformities go back almost seven years. Tracks have come and gone in that time. They don’t leave until they’ve undertaken a stringent quality control process. It started slowly, but has picked up momentum in the last eighteen months. Recorded and re-recorded to the correct level of imperfection, and then left to breathe. Mixed and re-mixed. Carefully compiled when the time was right.
"If Krautrock felt like a reaction to Germany’s totalitarian past, a new chapter defined by freaky optimism and a race to the margins, Craven Faults also feels like a historical reckoning of sorts: a cold elegy to Britain’s industrial heyday" 8/10, Uncut (lead review)
"Glacial landscapes a go-go on mesmerising debut by Yorkshire producer" 4/5, Mojo
"Often feeling less like the work of human hands than sounds breathed out by the moors around their Yorkshire home, the drones have an almost geological weight and pace"
9/10, DJ Magazine
"Floating somewhere between ’60s visions of dystopian future, and an increasingly dystopian present" The Vinyl Factory
"Erratics & Unconformities harks back to seminal early experiments in electronic music wherein loop-spinning machines were left to communicate with each other"
8/10, The Line Of Best Fit
"70s-era Tangerine Dream, with perhaps a dash of Phillip Glass-style minimalism" Electronic Sound
"Craven Faults music provides a noirish, introspective ride through Farfisa drones and tape-hiss textures; it’s meditative, patient music for fans of Pye Corner Audio, Demdike Stare and James Holden" XLR8R