Sirconical - Waving At Planes
[Twisted Nerve]

Anyone who has followed Gareth Malinson’s progress as Sirconical, through the sporadic live performances, EPs and downloads, knows that he makes laptops do beautiful things. Waving At Planes is the sort of debut long player that proves that taking it slowly pays off. There isn’t a single bad or indifferent thing about this record.

Opening with the louchely dripping underwater aquarium jazz of Joulouville, there’s an unnerving beauty running through the album. At times it’s dark and creepy. Tracks like Lights Out have a dreamlike quality that would sit well on the soundtrack to a David Lynch film. Eerily supernatural and vaguely menacing, with its baroque electronica, the beauty of this track is the way the experimental combines perfectly with the populist.

Gone, long a live favourite, is a distorted mass of sounds being broadcast from another galaxy. Peaks and troughs of near white noise combine to form an industrial melody, underpinned by damped down bass and a deceptively simple drumbeat.

At other times the album is precociously quirky. Ziggonometry is grimy drum’n’bass from the future, and is the sound of being licked by a cat while floating on a li-lo by the Westway. Shale squelches along like it’s the first amoeba to grow legs and escape the primordial soup, just in time to discover funk and chill out with the Smash Martians in a lakeside cabin. Cheeky, sleazy dub.

In the middle of all this avant garde, experimental stuff, is the sheer perfection of Rose. Hushed and reverential, like a peal of bells heard in the distance, Rose is a close relative of Blue Sky Research’s work.

Add in the epic, euphoric and sparkly In Your Own Time, the epileptic death disco of first single Gioco, and the spectrally gamelan interludes of Waves One, Two and Three, and you have an album that grins like a Time Lord born in Salford at the way its contemporaries have to try so hard.