By Joshua Van TasselIn the London BBC building, 1958, a room existed called the Radiophonic Workshop. A group of sonic experimentalists worked diligently away creating previously unheard sounds using only cut up tape loops, lots of cigarettes, and even more imagination (most notable output was the original Dr. Who theme). The workshop existed for years, until suddenly the Moog synthesizer appeared on the scene in the late 1960’s, and changed the way sounds were able to be re-produced. Tape loops? Now considered too time consuming, unpredictable, messy. The Radiophonics resisted this change-over not because they feared new technology, but because they felt that technology should never drive the human, the human should be driving the technology. Using tape, they were forced to rely on will and imagination rather than flipping through presets and picking a machine given sound.
What Wintersleep has done with Hello Hum is to combine the best parts of the machine and human world. The record creates a perfect marriage of huge synths and heavy production with quality songs played by, simply put, a great band writing really good music. Cymbals eat guitars then spit out a red sheen of ambient mist while double tracked hard panned drums fire away like a wet dog on a hardwood floor. Even while the sonic world seems to blow up around him, singer Paul Murphy comes straight through the chaos with borderline manic/anthemic melodies and the kind of confidence that you only get after 5 records.
With help from producers Tony Doogan and Dave Friedman, the band has made a record that in it’s best moments sounds like they’re standing in the middle of green skied electro storm holding hands, collectively refusing to move. They control the sonic world around them and bring it deep into the heart of what they do without letting the production take over. The Radiophonics would put this album on, smoke a cigarette, and smile with the satisfaction of hearing a band firmly driving an album full of great songs with technology in the passenger’s seat.
