Bleep

A loose collection of genres, concepts and buzzwords follow UK label Ghost Box around — hauntology, lost futures, nostalgia sci-fi, folk horror and so on — but it’s hard to define what exactly makes a Ghost Box record. On Pye Corner Audio aka Martin Jenkin’s latest on the label entitled Entangled Routes, the third part of the trilogy including Stasis (2016) and Hollow Earth (2019) he loosely plays with the concept of mycorrhizal networks and the human attempts to listen in to them through his consistently suggestive electronica.

Downtempo four to the floor rhythms give a gently enveloping pulse to many of the tracks here, and subtle percussive layering, familiar bass-lines and synthesis are given space to develop and breathe across the length of a single track, allowing the listener to burrow deeper and deeper into somewhere not quite known. There is a suggestive subterranean quality to much of the record then, track titles aside. A fascination with the mycorrhizal and its connection with human thought has become increasingly popular in recent years: Entangled Routes would be a good sonic accompaniment to Anna Tsing’s fascinating book 'The Mushroom at the End of the World’ (2015) which provides an optimistic view of human ingenuity in the face of precarity. In fact, Entangled Routes could be similarly described as optimistic, light or phosphorescent in comparison to previously darker work such as Sleep Games (2012): major key arpeggios bloom across the tail end of ‘The Clearing’, even the shorter moments such as ‘The Long Now’’s luminous synth study leave a lasting elated impression. ‘Symbiosis’ leaves things with dense sound design and climbing, modulating arpeggios and while the record evokes some of the Ghost Box buzzwords — there’s certainly a nostalgia for the sci-fi soundtracks of the 80s on ‘Buried Network’ and ‘Phantom Orchid’ — it develops and advances the already unique Pye Corner Audio sound world, one as searching and elusive as Ghost Box itself.