CRAVEN FAULTS Standers
THE LEAF LABEL 8/10 Cairn you dig it? More modular synth marvels, hewn from solid rock.
IN lieu of a photo of its anonymous creator, the cover stars of Craven Faults’ second album are the Nine Standards – or Standers – of Hartley Fell in the North Pennines. Nobody knows for sure when or why these giant conical cairns were built, but local historians reckon them to be at least 800 years old; some even believe they were built by the Romans, to resemble a distant army battalion keeping watch from the hilltop.
While obviously manmade, the structures have been around long enough to feel like a part of the landscape, an ancient geological quirk. You don’t have to trek far from Hartley Fell to nd more recent examples of this phenomenon: abandoned quarries resembling limestone fault scarps and disused industrial tracks snaking down the hillsides like mountain streams. This is the psychogeographical terrain of Craven Faults, whose minimalist electronic throb – proceeding with slow, unshakable purpose across tracks that can last up to 18 minutes – can initially seem as enigmatic and forbidding as the Standers themselves. The more you listen, though, the more familiar, warm and human it begins to feel.
It’s all created on a huge and everexpanding modular synthesiser, housed in a tin shed on an industrial estate in a Yorkshire mill town, within hiking distance of both the fells and the defunct factories that provide the visual inspiration. Other instruments are occasionally deployed, including a Far sa organ, a heavily reverbed guitar, or the electric grand piano line that lends an epic, Vangelis quality to “Idols & Altars”. But Craven Faults prefers to paint with a limited palette, relying on the modular synth for rhythm as well as texture and melody.
The name itself refers to the geological fractures that cross the Pennines, exposing the limestone features at Malham Cove and Gordale Scar, while their rst series of EPS were named a¢er defunct mills in Guiseley. As with The Beta Band, those three EPS were such a perfect statement of his MO that the subsequent debut album, Erratics & Unconformities, felt like a little bit of a disappointment. But Craven Faults didn’t waver, didn’t call in any guest vocalists. If anything, his 2020 EP “Enclosures” was even more uncompromisingly stark, hinting at a political dimension to his stoical moorland surveys.
Standers is his nest work to date because it manages to expand his emotional range without introducing new sonic elements that might dilute the overall vision. “Meers & Hushes” assumes the melancholy grace of a lovelorn folk ballad, while the bouncing bassline of “Severals” is almost breezy. Add a thudding beat to “Sun Vein Strings”’s sense of rising euphoria and you could imagine people dancing to it in a eld at dawn.
Craven Faults’ iconography rejects the usual depiction of synthesiser music as futuristic, spacey or psychedelic. And for good reason – these tracks feel earthy and primeval, as though they’ve been dug up from below rather than beamed down from the cosmos. The presentation is a shrewd conceit, providing a focus for your imagination as these monolithic pieces unfurl. But it’s not like a conceptual art show, where you need the gallery notes to make sense of it. Despite the ascetic vibe, this is visceral, emotional music, forged in the white heat of rock’n’roll and post-punk rather than the academic avant-garde.
Craven Faults himself references “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Radioactivity” and “Sister Ray”, as well as Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”, a haunting piece of deeply existential music for strings, utes and trumpet rst performed in 1946. Tune into the right frequency, and you begin to hear all kinds of other – presumably subconscious – resonances: the main riff heralding “Sun Vein Strings” that sounds like a synthesised version of “TV Eye”; “Odda Delf”’s passing resemblance to Radiohead’s “Street Spirit”; the offbeat ‘pling’ throughout “Hurrocstanes” that suddenly puts you in mind of “Superfly”.
But the beauty of Standers is that it invites you to consider these lightning ashes of 20th-century transcendence on a much longer continuum, stretching back into the mists of time. Tune out again, and all you can hear is the low, slow grumbling of those fault systems, grinding infinitesimally beneath our feet.