the internal garden

Now I must admit the looming to the surface of a massive apology at this point because, give or take a month or two, this time last year, when learning of our diagnosis and indeed embarking on our first experience of chemotherapy, Justin of Dreams of Tall Buildings was one of the first with comforting words, offering up sonic experimental suites he’d been developing in his aural potting shed, noting this should take your mind off the challenges. Alas the files are lost and buried on a crashed hard drive somewhere, yet to this day, I don’t think I ever got a chance at the time to say how they did indeed help me in some part through the process and boredom of a six hour sitting wired up to a drip feeding me, what was essentially, poison. Fast forward to the present and the continued experiments with plants has enabled Mr Wiggan to synthesize into a digital coding, the conversations and relationship responses of various fauna and with a great deal of wizardry, quite frankly beyond our true understanding, extrapolate these binary impulses into a musical notation from therein, with the aid of some pretty hi-tech gizmos forging an interface of sorts, with himself fto form what he calls, ‘an immersive physical dimensional field’, at this point we are ghosting into the kind of sci-fi terrains more common in the works of John Wyndham, the type of nature invasion that birthed the appearance of the Krynoid’s in the classic era Baker Doctor Who episode ‘the Seeds of Doom’. Anyhow enough of that and back to the point, new release from the uber eclectic Gardener’s Delight imprint features two (in truth just one, the flip is a more traditional musical species) of these, lab tested varieties. Pressed on mottled green lathe cut vinyl in an edition 53 ours incidentally is #22 in case you are taking notes, I haven’t as yet, worked out the significance of the 53 only pressing from which these Gardeners Delight releases are all cut, perhaps something for a later day then. Starting with the flip side, just to be awkward, ‘internal garden’ features the conservationist rap of guesting Josh set to a driving drum n’ bass work out, the message clearly politicised and bleakly direct is conscious pricking, its dystopic messaging enhanced grimly by the drilled and sterile n’ oblique ice cool fixed stare of the beats as they forge a curiously stark and mutant jazz hybrid. In sharp contrast, ‘orange soup dragon and the sleeping gunnera’ is awash with old school Radiophonic aspects, the textures cavernous, sparse and strangely trippy, relocate you to a somewhere else where, amid the seeming chuckles and outer worldly disconnection, a strange and alien subterranean world is animated in play.