Stars of the Wayside catches Twilight Sequence in full view, with no studio veil to hide behind: just Matthew J Saunders set up in Sherborne’s hippest record shop, The Beat and Track, while customers drift inches from his gear. The space - curated by walking music encyclopedia Paul Maskell - is small, stacked with vinyl and conversation, the kind of room where sound can’t help but wrap itself around bodies and sleeves. Into this close‑up environment Saunders brings his portable laboratory, using the shop as a temporary control room in which to spin out the kind of strange, evolving electronic webs that usually unfurl in private. The result is a live document that feels both intimate and gently psychedelic, like stumbling onto an in‑store set that slowly turns into its own parallel weather system.

For the performance, Saunders set himself a deliberately awkward brief: arrive with some looper pedals, a semi‑modular synth, a sampler, an OP‑1 and a clutch of effects, then see what can be built with only the haziest of plans. “The challenge was to take along some looper pedals, a semi-modular synth, sampler, OP-1 synth and a bunch of effects pedals and make something cool without much of a plan. Some of these pieces had a germ of an idea pre-gig, some were entirely improvised from scratch in the moment.” That tension between premeditation and freefall runs through the record. Certain passages clearly grow from pre‑planted seeds - a chord sequence, a rhythmic motif, a favourite patch architecture - but they are stretched, re‑voiced and sometimes abandoned altogether as the performance unfolds. Elsewhere, Saunders is clearly discovering the music at the same time as the people flicking through the bins: layering one loop too many, riding the feedback of a delay, or letting an accidental harmony dictate the next move.

What emerges is a kind of live cartography of his practice. The semi‑modular system provides slowly shifting pulses and textures; the OP‑1 sprinkles brittle melodies, sampled fragments and grainy percussive details; loopers catch phrases that are then blurred, reversed or cut away just as they settle. Effects pedals smear the boundaries, turning single notes into halos and simple ostinatos into starfields. You can hear him responding to the room - stretching out when the atmosphere deepens, tightening the focus when the energy needs a nudge. Rather than a seamless, polished set, Stars of the Wayside embraces the bumps and pivots that make genuine improvisation so alive: the moment a loop refuses to lock, the slight fumble that becomes a motif, the sudden magic when several parameters line up in an unrepeatable way.

Saunders is more than equipped for this kind of risk. A seasoned recording artist and performer, he has released records on 4AD, Castles in Space, Earworm and Folk Police, and has worked with Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, King Creosote, James Yorkston and others, moving easily between song‑based structures and more exploratory forms. Beyond Twilight Sequence, he records and performs with Rapid Eye Electronics Ltd. (R.E.E.L.), Assembled Minds and Magnétophone, each alias tracing a different orbit around his core interests in texture, harmony and narrative drift. His live performances of improvised guitar, archived on his @unity_gains channel, show the same instinct translated to another instrument: build a scaffold, then gently saw through it in real time.