VHS Head

Stitching together VHS tape footage from horror B movies, instructional videos, and all manner of sonic obscurities from his vast archive, VHS Head makes a celebrated return to Skam Records with his first album in almost a decade following 2014’s Persistence of Vision, and one of the heaviest to land on the label in their relatively quiet years since. Furthering his tireless quest in cutting up VHS tapes to make visceral electronica, his third album Phocus is the soundtrack to an “unfinished science fiction film made in the Fylde coast area”. It’s not so much a linear cinematic narrative, however, but rather a multilayered corpus of magic, monsters, and mayhem, a Choose Your Own Adventure album that prompts you to fill in the gaps and solve the riddle.

It’s not just a cleverly punned name: in many ways, Ade Blacow assumes the persona of the tape head, reading, writing, and recording plunderphonic glory through the minuscule magnetic fields of tape. He conjures the images of endless bookshelves of curiosities, of arcane memorabilia hidden in nooks and crannies, of musique concrète cutups piled to the ceilings. Since his very first release in 2009, he has cemented himself as a clear master of musical manipulation, with the well travelled and widely sourced nature of his collection evidencing his unparalleled knowledge of sound and screen, and his ability to completely twist and transform whatever he comes across.

With the breadth of recontextualised material VHS Head employs, there’s a pervading sense of lore to his music. Mystery and enigma lie in carefully selected dialogue samples, grasping at grand, dramatic stories that lie beneath the kaleidoscopic haze. The film that Phocus scores explores the titular character and “the duality of actions on and off screen”, set to an intense “behind the scenes journey” mixing the sounds of 80s synthwave, electro, and vaporwave into an electrified whirlwind of sample splendour. As time has moved on since this album’s release, the lore has expanded with the follow up Phasia EP, an episodic elaboration travelling even further into Phocus’s psyche.

And where exactly does our main character go? As Phocus roams The Fylde, we catch fantasised glimpses of VHS Head’s home pastures: perhaps Blackpool becomes a thriving posthuman hub, its famed piers are repurposed into spacecraft launchpads, the surrounding floodplains are the site of witchcraft, digitised spells, and cyborgian leviathans. Drenched in the aesthetics of cassette futurism, the album envisions a starry, frenetic dreamland for the UK’s lesser explored sci fi terrain.

As soon as we enter the album, we are splintered into its engulfing storyline. ‘Cold Open (Dust to Dust)’ ephemerally paradigm shifts between scenes each time the camera shutter closes and reopens, while a creaky voice intones “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: a potent omen to open this sonic odyssey. ‘Fake Sweat’ continues that thread with its murky, pummelling beats, its slithering bass, action-packed with destructive synthwave and the growls of “You have the courage... You belong to me... Pull the trigger.”

Glitching rainbow VHS artefacts show in the stuttering sunset guitars and trickling shards of synths filtered across the album, guided by dense jungles of heavy drums and glossy storms of arpeggios ripping right through. ‘Skinflex’ is hazy and dazed with the chopped up tape sounds that VHS Head takes his name from, packing serious punches as molten bass revs into iridescent mist and static. ‘Shoes For Dinosaurs’ references old-style monster movies with hyperspeed glitters, torn up screams, and microbeat splatters, while the blistering magnet storm clears for ‘Devour the Heart’, turning down a magical route as ethereal saxophone echoes mimic light bent through layers of tape and synth shimmer.

With his long-awaited third album Phocus, VHS Head constructs an elaborate, otherworldly mythos for a “low budget thriller”, opening up yet another CRT screen treasure trove.

VHS Head