rupert lally

Second instalment in the Bibliotapes series, this time a more darker affair distanced in a Radiophonic stillness, this is Rupert Lally’s sonic visualisation of Wyndham’s ecological nightmare ‘the day of the triffids’. A tensely wired suite stunned in regret and a primitivism that captures perfectly that sense of blind isolation and the terrifying realisation of the hunter becoming the hunted. Utilising stark arrangements both minimal and eerily alien, Lally has composed a suite both desolate and isolationist, it’s something that mirrors the foreboding haunts and melodic macabre that was a one-time trademark of Tristram Cary and something that parallels sonically, the strange disconnection explored by Mount Vernon Arts Lab on their reading of ‘séance at Hob’s Lane’. For here coded in sparse spectral signatures, a fearful portent and sense of the end are brought to bear with ominous effect, the sounds blunted somewhat guttural and primal, for the most part neatly choreograph the printed word with both the bewildered and stumbling uncertainty of ‘the groping city’ and the terror-phonic ‘shadows before’ being executed with an alarming acuteness that preys to the gravity of mankind’s blindness. Side 2 shifts the dynamic, a tenderness emerges that’s finitely curved and courted in a pastoral purring (‘evacuation’ and the genteel ethereal of ‘Tynsham’ set the parameters to this more silken and dreamlike advance), yet like the novel, ahead of the moments of serene beauty, danger lurks. Dotted here, the church like solitude of ‘dead end’ quietly sighs slipping seductively into the lilting symphonic hush of the rustically skipping ‘journey in hope’ while acceptance and rebirth are the order of the day on the curtain closing ‘strategic withdrawal’ which to a mournful toning a survivalist serene shimmers.