Cassette Edition available here
I used to be a fairly firm believer in the word Lynchian being used to only describe things that David Lynch made. Sometimes though, there are exceptions that have to be made. Throughout the extended scenario that is WHNZ:77: Softures, there’s a mixture of abstraction and narrative that’s all at once confused, focused, familiar, dark, and as fractured as dementia.
A dip in the subconscious that documents a descent, Frank Baugh opens his latest Night Sky Body with an 11-and-a-half minute piece of Skinamarink-toned psychedelic industrial. Skating around minor chaos as tempos and rhythms scuff against each other, there are shortwave voices jarring as melodies appear, stall, and then lock like gears. Sinister string parts glide as the low end paces the hallway.
With the main substance of the album being Impressionistic ungluings that are both sound and setting, the atmosphere very quickly coats everything that comes into view. Sleights of guitar, slo-mo car crashes, distant alarm tones; sounds unsettle and molt their original place and intent. Midway through the tracklist, although time is something of a difficult thing to gauge in the forward wake of Softures by this point, P-Top sits as the most bullish piece here – its brevity pushing that point even more to the fore.
A series of ideas surfacing in the dark, seven untuned experiments that drift through consciousness uninvited and unrestricted.
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