The legendary synth-pop songwriter best known for Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure releases, at last, his first solo album, a mesmeric, ambient, darkly sci-fi cinematic work made from modular synthesisers. It’s a project borne from a dark moods of lockdown, but for Clarke, it was sparked by learning Eurorack system skills via YouTube videos for endless hours in his New York home basement studio. It’s particularly inspired by the atmospheres of the Bladerunner movies, and standouts of that vivid quality include On The Lamentations of Jeremiah featuring Reed Hays’s strikingly beautiful, dark cello, and the long notes of the track Passage with Caroline Joy’s surreal, ethereally operatic soprano voice. White Rabbit is another otherworldly synth futuristic exploration, here with fast arpeggios, while Blackleg is drone-filled and features the distant voice of a folk singer, echoing between past and future, singing a 19th-century Northumberland mining song about a mining strike scab. “Take yer tools and yer duds as well, and hoy them down to the pit of hell … down you go, and fare ye well, you dirty blackleg miner.” Eerily vivid, Eno-esque and evocative all the way to the ghostly bleeps of end track, Last Transmission. Out on Mute.
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