Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents

“For the unfamiliar, The Transcendence Orchestra is the duo of British Murder Boy and tQ fave Anthony Child (aka Surgeon) and Daniel Bean. Their music they make resists easy categorisation, especially on their latest. It’s definitely psychedelic, but a bit too prickly for most ambient tags to stick, a bit too gnarled for new age, a bit too grotty to properly fit in with the modern classical crowd. Given this nebulous state of affairs, our boys naturally found a happy home with Editions Mego prior to the tragic death of its founder Peter Rehberg, releasing three ‘proper’ studio LPs through the label. For this album, their fourth in five years, they’ve opted to go it alone via their Old Technology label, which I think makes sense. This record, their best by some margin, feels like the start of a new leg in the band’s journey
Even fans of The Transcendence Orchestra’s previous work will be surprised by how incredibly tactile Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents is. This is an album you feel as much as hear, setting the group apart from a sea of ambient-leaning Cluster enthusiasts armed with modular rigs and microphone arrays. The bass tones in particular are properly, properly heavy and Earth-en and stoned, holding fast to amplifier worship and soundsystem culture. Here, Child and Bean lay claim to a very particular blending of both ‘low’ and high-minded aesthetics that hits you just as hard in the chest as it does in the brain. These tracks stick in the way Kevin Richard Martin’s recent recordings under his own name do, or the way Mark Dicker’s do. It all boils down to a similar combination of patient headiness and unconventional beauty and rough tactility, to the clear presence of gut and heart at play in the compositions.”