Analogue shizz from the weird north
Who They?
Polypores are a group of fungi that form fruiting bodies with pores or tubes on the underside… Ignore that, actually. The only Polypores you need in your life is Stephen Buckley, purveyor of strange and beautiful electronic music from Preston, England. He’s a bit like Pye Corner Audio covering Eduard Artemyev (composer of score for Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’), but infinitely better than that sounds.
Why Polypores?
Well, the fungi description might have more than a spore of truth. There’s a dark, subterranean underside to Buckley’s work; his music seems to seep up from the soil, from in among the nooks and crannies, before grasping towards wide and starry skies. From this claustrophobic murk, Buckley is always able to summon sections of soaring cosmic flabbergast – see ‘Post-Extinction’ for details. But if you like John Carpenter, you should definitely dig in.
Tell Us More
His album ‘The Impossibility’ (concerning Earth’s destruction at the hands of the human race) was released by Polytechnic Youth late last year, and it doesn’t sound at all out of place alongside their roster of Vic Mars and Listening Center among others. They’re curating quite some library of sounds and haunted synths, but Polypores provides a dynamic range rarely exhibited by his peers. While tracks such as ‘Transmutation’ scuttle about in the leaf litter, ‘Divine Astronaut’ drifts with the listener in astral serenity. This ability to move deftly between the sinister and the blissful is what makes the album so thoroughly engaging.
‘The Impossibility’ is out on Polytechnic Youth
