Degradation

*2023 stock* Leadlined is a 35-minute lamentation of the perverse ideology of the English, shaped by sound collage and heavy electronics. Heaving drones of memory churn the decayed hum of modernism and the spiritual bus routes of the past. £40 million of military hardware flying low over the colonial jugular; the knifing wind off the Kentish coast, shearing through the tendons of Roman roads and Saxon shores. Through the record’s mediation of these imagined pasts and displaced futures — the sinews of a settler class — the debilitating power of personal bereavement collides with the enervating deluge of a grieving national mythology. 

The record is a carrier bag of improvisation and fragmented assembly. Post-industrial synthesis gives way to full-spectrum noise, and intrusive thoughts are excavated via aural saturation bombing. Shaped by collapsing signal chains & biting delays, Leadlined pores over the rapine chain of degeneration that is England. Through bricolage it attempts to come to terms with the inescapable, morbid nostalgia of the nation’s psyche. In this impasse of postponed crisis, future horizons recede and misdirected resentments permeate all things.

Degradation push these cold tones of clay and lead through networks of machinery and loss. Sounds are processed and reprocessed, field recordings swallowed and regurgitated through 35-year-old-hardware. Whispers crackle through a geiger pulse, modulated by municipal memory aides. This is art production as process, wrung out on stolen time. Don’t quit the day job. In a sustained state of melancholia, we sit on the country’s hard edge, in all the squall and murmur, shadows refracted by the wine-dark sea.

Degradation is D O’Donoghue (who records under the moniker Vinegar Tom) and G Rayner-Law (who records under his own name, and formerly as Schwerpunkt).