There’s a neat trick of rhythm at the beginning of “Stoneyman,” the second cut on Craven Faults’ new album, Sidings. Ringing piano eighths gallop at a brisk mid-tempo, while percussive hits ring out in the distance. A rich, staccato ramp wave pitched an octave lower begins faintly doubling the piano, drawing closer over the course of a few bars. Once a kick drum materializes on the horizon, the piano line’s accents shift position, like the swift readjustment after a skipped heartbeat. The effect is disorienting, akin to watching a tire and its hubcap rotate in seemingly opposite directions. As the song progresses, more elements—slow-moving filter sweeps, waltzing arpeggios, a deep and doomy bassline—appear and disappear, moving into the fore of the stereo field before corroding and flaking away. Time moves in hypnotic curls more than it progresses linearly, shedding any sense of beginnings or endings.
This is standard operating procedure for Craven Faults. The shadowy UK synthesist, who keeps his identity private and his back to the audience, has essentially been sharpening this one compositional approach for the better part of a decade. It’s a process he discussed in a recent interview with Sun13, explaining that he was initially drawn to the modular for its ability to produce “interlocking patterns of notes with gradually shifting textures and tones.” His goal isn’t to craft through-composed switched-on symphonies; instead, he prioritizes communing with the synthesizer itself, meditating on a phrase before making subtle but seismic changes. These are typically sidelong affairs built from layered, repetitive figures, extended journeys patiently connecting one patch point to another. Presence is the music’s raison d’être.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Even beyond the runtimes, there’s a strange, extratemporal feeling saturating this project. The few photos of Craven Faults’ setup show stacks of 5U modular synth cases: giant, wall-sized arrays of circuits chained together with quarter-inch patch cables. It’s the format Robert Moog developed in the ’60s, an antiquated and cumbersome predecessor to today’s more compact and ubiquitous Eurorack systems. The sounds he coaxes from the modules have a tangible, almost earthen, organic quality, even when doused in reverb and echo. Peers like Jo Johnson or Jas Shaw mine similar territory, but where their tunes have a more contemporary sheen, a Craven Faults recording is haunted and otherworldly. It could easily be some long-lost Berlin School private press or alternate score for The Stone Tape.
Every Craven Faults record is immersive and overwhelming, and Sidings is no different. It has a sneaky way of rubberbanding your perception of time; the album clocks in at just over an hour, but some listens feel like a lightning bolt, others like an entire day. You can zoom through all 16 minutes of opener “Ganger” in an instant, carried by its propulsive waves of sharp notes and cresting LFOs, or you can stretch into its interweaving, siren-like sequences, smeared with delay drifting in and out of phase. The repeated melody of “Drover Hole Sike,” one of the album’s shortest tracks, expands for its entire duration, yawning around you before quietly dissipating. Nearly every sound lingers like an unanswered question, and the scant bass drums that appear in most tracks are less for keeping time than providing anchor points in an inestimable nebula.
