10-20
Magnet Marsh
B60-01
Broken60
21 Tracks. 58mins08secs

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While CD sales continue to dwindle ever further into insignificance as MP3s and other digital formats  become more and more dominant, there has been a steady resurgence of old-style analogue formats, first with vinyls then, more recently, with the cassette tape. Whilst remaining tied up to specialist markets, these formats are providing an increasingly potent counterpoint to the all-digital revolution, and their popularity is a testament to their longevity. By definition, the cassette was always the ultimate practical music format, due in no small part to its handy size and recordable capacity, making it the first essential portable medium with the advent of the Sony Walkman in the eighties, and the first music sharing tool via mixtapes and self-released cassettes.

Newly-formed sister label to the itself fledging Broken20 imprint set up by The Village Orchestra’s Ruaridh Law, and curated by his former Marcia Blaine School For Girls co-member Dave Donnelly, AKA Production Unit, Broken60 aims to ‘only release music that makes sense in tape format’. Inaugurating this new structure is 10-20’s second full length, Magnet Marsh. Author of a rather splendid self-titled debut album and four digital EPs on the sorely missed Highpoint Lowlife imprint two years ago, 10-20 returns with a rather different opus here.

Clocking (nearly) at a standard cassette-formatted hour, Magnet Marsh is a sprawling electronic enterprise which touches on some of its predecessors’ scope, but looks out in a somewhat different direction. While the enigmatically-monikered Devon-based 10-20 exposed a series of bare yet claustrophobic soundscapes, where muted voices floated over fragmented beats or dried up dub grooves, on his debut, he distills here a much more fluid and luxurious blend of electronic music which, whilst still partially subjected to the seismic shocks of shattered hip-hop or techno beats, opens up to rich ambient soundscapes and leaves out much of the closeted tension which powered his earlier material. Furthermore, whilst 10-20’s debut had an undeniable urban feel, its beats as cold and polished as concrete, and that the EPs that followed did very little to buck this trend, the tone here is overwhelming warmer and more pastoral, as if Magnet Marsh represented the human flip side of the whole 10-20 scope. This element of warmth, of course, is one of the primary arguments of those who favour vinyls and tapes to CDs and digital files, so there’s the element which ‘makes sense’ in having Magnet Marsh made available on a magnetic tape.

Split into two fairly distinct half hour sections, each with their own centre of gravity and life cycle, yet bound by a single vision, Magnet Marsh represents a consequent journey into unashamedly electronic territories. 10-20 creates here simmering miniature organic structures which develop slowly, sometimes seemingly over the course of a few tracks. His constructions are still somewhat sparse and minimal, but whilst he purposely fed from that status before, keeping his tracks stripped down and dry, he goes against it here and works up much more luxuriant pieces. His approach is not fundamentally different, but the angle from which he tackles his compositions is resolutely more ambitious and fluid. In fact, fluidity is a key factor in this album, from the bubbling water pictured on the cover to the liquid aspect of much of the soundscapes found throughout, especially on Falcon Powdered, Escape From Prism, Reed Bed or Sap, where his use of basis dub effects or sonic manipulations deliberately emphasise the fluctuating aspect applied. There are occasional earthier moments along the way, never more than on the droney and saturated Dytche or on the first half of Sandtun, whilst Dust seems to return for a moment to the desolate appearance of past records, but these never last for long and are quickly pushed aside or swallowed into more complex formations.

Magnet Marsh is in many ways a far less straightforward album than its predecessor, or at least, it is one which requires a deeper involvement on the part of the listener, but it is also a more accomplished collection of electronic music. And, while it was devised with, and produced for, the good old cassette tape, the album is also available as a digital download, if only, perhaps, to make its appeal wider.

4.4/5

Broken60
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