CRAVEN FAULTS
Erratics & Unconformities
THE LEAF LABEL 8/10 Bleak and blasted English electronica.
AN Instagram account is the 2019 version of a window into one’s soul, and a perusal of Craven Faults’s online presence feels especially revealing. Browse through their feed and you get an immediate sensation of this mysterious outfit’s very particular interests. Hulking Moog modular systems sit next to images of ancient stone circles, reel-to-reel tape recorders and analogue dials abut crumbling slate walls and the chilly geometry of electricity pylons cut a metallic path through cold English moorland. But the clearest thing you learn about Craven Faults here is through what omitted. No humans are to be seen: not a glimpse of flesh and blood to spoil Craven Faults’s distinctive, secretive aesthetic, a blend of bleak and blasted English landscape and antiquated pre-digital technology.
Craven Faults have been operational since 2017, and prior to Erratics & Unconformities have released three 12” EPS – “Netherfield Works”, “Nunroyd Works” and “Springhead Works” – each one apparently dedicated to an area of fading northern industry. Working out of an old textile mill in Yorkshire, their music – made using a mix of vintage and contemporary modular electronics and drum machines – gestures to the atmospheric explorations of “kosmische”, albeit aiming for a space rather grittier and landbound: an atmospheric electronica with grease on its palms and soil under its fingernails. In this sense, Craven Faults have a few clear kin: think Pye Corner Audio and the synth-powered wing of the Ghost Box label, the tin-pot analogue constructions of the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra, or even past outer-limits explorers like Throbbing Gristle, whose invocations of Britain’s industrial past imbued their music with a sort of impersonal, mechanical quality explicitly designed to unsettle.
Following on the heels of those 12”, Erratics & Unconformities is Craven Faults’s first album proper, and there is the sense that they are upping their game. The opening “Vacca Wall” spirits up layers of shimmering arpeggiated tones from a Moog modular system that interact in increasingly dramatic variations, underpinned by the slow pulse of a drum machine kick. Clocking in at 17 minutes, it recalls one of those ’70s Klaus Schulze tracks that filled up a full side of vinyl, but its subtle progressions, guided with a careful hand, ensure it remains gripping throughout. Simultaneously captivating is the following “Deipkier”. Its circling synth melodies initially have a sombre, liturgic quality, as if issuing from the cobwebbed organ in some lonely chapel. But gradually, imperceptibly, their tone changes, ’til eventually they glint like metal hewn from rock.
The debt that Craven Faults owe to their genre forerunners is unmistakable. “Hangingstones” is a beautifully atmospheric track played on the Farfisa organ beloved of past groups from Pink Floyd to Stereolab, while “Cupola Smelt Mill” is an eddying electronic instrumental imbued with glimmers of optimism; think Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” re-routed through the Yorkshire moors and you’re more or less there. Still, in part thanks to their fastidious compositional approach, in part down to their careful anonymity, Craven Faults transcend obvious reference points. There is real craft here. Spring reverb, tape echo and reel-toreel tape are carefully applied to bring a sense of roughness and texture. Elsewhere, simple ideas are realised over the long haul, as on “Slack Sley & Temple”, a patient feat of processing that sees a pulsing electronic tone gradually bent around like a girder. Towards the end of the track, a field recording enters the audio field, and we hear the pump and hiss of heavy machinery, as if an ancient factory has just whirred back into action in a haze of soot.
Public Service Broadcasting have made hay in this sort of territory by smearing their synth reveries in a sentimental patina – the kosmische equivalent of a Hovis advert. Craven Faults feel like they’re tapping into a more primal, buried quality of the English psyche. If krautrock felt like a reaction to Germany’s totalitarian past, a new chapter defined by freaky optimism and a race to the margins, Craven Faults also feels like a historical reckoning of sorts: a cold elegy to Britain’s industrial heyday, its nostalgia not guided by entreaties to “Keep Calm And Carry On”, but by an angry nobility and a deep-seated sadness for what has passed.