Of Nature & Electricity

Pressed on 180g “cenote green” vinyl + stamped and numbered riso print, printed in the state51 Atelier.

“Every time you do acid it’s different from the last, but it’s still got a unique signature to it,” says Michael J York. It’s roughly analogous to the way in which the music of Teleplasmiste – his duo with Mark O Pilkington – can be experienced. Their music is lush and layered like a rainforest floor, a complex lattice of sound that moves in several directions at once. Some of those movements are under the surface, buried purposefully low in the mix “so they can surprise you when you’re under different conditions,” as Pilkington puts it. “Like psychedelics, we like to think that people can return to the music in different moods and different frames of mind, and that different things will appear in their hearing.” It fits the cosmic experimentation that the duo have explored on previous albums such as To Kiss The Earth Goodbye and Frequency is The New Ecstasy, and acts as an adjunct to York’s previous work as part of Coil, and currently alongside Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi in The Utopia Strong.

Of Nature And Electricity is as forward-thinking as Teleplasmiste have ever been. “It’s some of the most complex music we’ve ever made,” says Pilkington. Its five tracks, only one of which is less than eight minutes in length, are all vast in scope. The collage-like approach to composition for this album has resulted in something disparate and dramatic, music that embraces intense swings in momentum and turns them to their advantage. “It was great to find ways to make a piece metamorphose into something completely different. Mike’s particularly good at joining things together that you don’t imagine would work,” Pilkington says. For all their new record’s wild waves of machine-generated noise, the band also weave in plenty of organic material. Three of the four tracks, York points out, “have got stuff recorded with a microphone on them.” On the meditative closer ‘Into Words And Out Of Them Again’, says Pilkington, “we noticed how present the air passing from Mike’s mouth into the pipe he’s playing was. You can hear it rasping and whistling. It just gives it a really vivid, organic presence, that can be lacking with some of your ‘music untouched by human hands’.” The LP’s title, Of Nature And Electricity, also neatly sums up the band’s entire ethos.

It’s the way Teleplasmiste find harmony between those two opposites that makes their music so engaging, using the power of analogue synthesis to tap into the ineffable, but simultaneously injecting enough nature and humanity to make it emotionally accessible – a cosmic canvas for that act of expressive exchange, which can be entirely different depending on the listener. They’re immensely proud of this new album – a chance to go bolder and make their music even more experimental:. “It’s a step further out from what we’ve done before,” says Pilkington. “It’s some of the most far out music we’ve ever made.”

The artwork for the album came about via their friend Fuchsia Voremberg, a rare book dealer, who mentioned that she had found something they needed to see, a one off 19th century collection of vividly-inked automated drawings made using a device called a pendulograph. Something like a harmonograph, the pendulograph is described in a 1881 publication by. Rev. John Andrew: ‘The Pendulograph: a series of Bi-Pendulum Writings of the Twenty Ratios of the Musical System; or Sound Seen in the Silence’. The proto-psychedelic images are the perfect complement to the album’s transportative music, and each copy of the vinyl LP will contain a risograph print of one of the images.