I love the fact that the BBC used to have a room full of people whose job was to fiddle around with pieces of sound, blending noises together. Their role was to provide incidental music to programmes such as Doctor Who, but chiefly seemed to set about making their tunes as unsettling as possible. “Readers of a certain age” will remember the unnerving music that accompanied “Near & Far”, as you sat in the library crouched round the school’s giant Ferguson television (or even worse to unhinge the mind if you were at home on the settee with the lucozade). This album from Richard Swift is jam-packed with pieces hugely redolent of the output of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, compromising mostly short tracks that rely more on texture than melody.

These pieces as used as soundtracks to his own short films, and as such only one piece could be tagged as a proper “song”. Thankfully, that song is amazing. “INST” is a wonderful track, a robotic choir of robots, all of differing sizes (in my mind at least) chanting the band name against creaking keyboards and a snappy rhythm. Towards the end of the song the robots all seem to turn on each before, zapping them out of existence as the album shifts into the hypnotic “Subplot”, taking us into the ambient soundscapes that dominate the rest of the collection.

From here its all very side 2 of Low, similar in theme to Air’s Virgin Suicides, ranging from the repetitively racy (”Shooting a Rhino Between the Shoulders” and “Theme 5″) to spaced out blissfulness (”Plan A & Plan B” and “They Provide Lights”). The other stand-out track is “Ghost of Hip-Hop”, which is a combination of the two, starting small before slow beats rattle towards its conclusion.

It is obviously hard to recommend an album on the strength of one amazing track contained within a series of incidental instrumentals. But recommend it I must, as this is a fine collection of electronic music, full of interesting touches drawn from a rich palette of appealing sounds and noises expertly crafted and drawn together. “INST” is an essential download if available, but even so, this rewarding album is well worth looking into.
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mp3:> Instruments Of Science & Technology: Shooting A Rhino Between The Shoulders

Links:
Instruments Of Science & Technology [label page]