With titles that read like lost episodes of ‘Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World’, ‘Spacemen Mystery Of The Terror Triangle’ combines the wobble and dust of 1980’s documentary with the synthesiser bombast of the decade’s TV shows. In doing so, The Night Monitor – aka Neil Scriven, Blackpool musician and mastermind behind the Fonolith label – pitches the record into the Venn intersection where modern folklore, mass media and pseudoscience merge.
With glass harmonium overtones that recall ‘Manège’ – the theme to Granada TV’s ‘Picture Box’ – ‘Bovine Bilocation’ adds eerie clout to this depiction of a supposedly real Welsh UFO mystery via sampled documentary dialogue. While ‘The Broad Haven Visitation’ explores similar cultural and sonic territory to artists such as Grey Frequency, Scriven’s work is more hyperbolic in its approach.
By blurring the lines between fact and fiction, he engages in a modern type of myth-making, his use of cinematic and televisual tropes become the spaces where we can postulate our own narrative details for, and personal responses to, these modern-day mythologies.
