- If you love Walls tracks like "Burnt Sienna," Sound Houses may come as a shock. Hazy, sun-dappled electronica and raw analogue grooves are in short supply here, and little wonder. The album was commissioned by the BBC, who gave the London duo access to the archive of Daphne Oram, founder, in 1958, of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. This journey into miles of deteriorating quarter-inch tape led to ten scowling (rather than shoegazing) tracks drawn from 1960s synth sounds.
Sound Houses feels a little sketchy and conceptual—three tracks are under two minutes long—and even in its most brutal phases, it never quite achieves the monolithic power of artists like Demdike Stare, Shifted or Samuel Kerridge. Nonetheless, if the aim was to show how Oram's sinister, dystopian sound prefigured the current generation of dread-mongers, Walls make a decent fist of it. There is plenty to chew on in "Some Shriller, And Some Deeper" or "Rendering The Voice II," particularly for Radiophonic Workshop geeks.
Walls are on far surer ground when deploying elegant ambient tropes or motoring along, wide-eyed and spaced-out, in Krautrock's wake. "As It Is In Gems And Prisms" is the most Walls-ian track of the set, while "Strange Lines And Distances," an off-dance floor experiment in befogged, funereal dub techno, give the album a meaty core. The shrill, outsized "A Very Large Metal Box," meanwhile, suggests this could have been a very different album had Walls taken it in a more lighthearted direction. Think of Sound Houses as a quality curio.
Tracklist01. Extremely Long Corridor
02. Orchards And Gardens
03. A Very Large Metal Box
04. Rendering The Voice I
05. Strange Lines And Distances
06. Reflexions, Refractions And Multiplications
07. Some Shriller And Some Deeper
08. Rendering The Voice II
09. Reflecting The Voice
10. As It Is In Gems And Prisms