Best Before 2027 - The Storm Bugs Wire Review

just in this review from edition 471 of the Wire music magazine.

The Storm Bugs Best Before 2027

Bandcamp DL

Philip Sanderson and Steven Ball first started making music as Storm Bugs in 1978. creating DIY pop and tape collage, putting out cassettes on their own Snatch Tapes label until 1981. Using old reel-to-reel machines, scratched/ locked groove records, fuzzy radio recordings, poetic half-spoken lyrics warped by tape manipulations, their work tapped into a surreal and distinctly British sort of gloom, laced with dry humour. In 2002 they revived the project with The Bugs Are Back EP, and in 2017 with Certified Original &Vintage Fakes.

Now arrives Best Before 2027. Like their earlier work, the album sounds as though it was made with rickety recording gear, only now the aesthetics are early DIY digital - endearingly lumpy DAW production, preset reverbs and hyperactive, babbling vector synths. Opener "Table Matters-la reference to their 1980 EP of the same name) is a disoriented stomp pinned in place by a monotone rhythmic vocal: Dull, bored, numb, grey, frazzled, sitting in a ditch/A hat, and a bottle, and a creeping sense of dread". "European Coffee Lounge" continues the sardonic mood, boasting a ridiculously catchy chorus framed by churning, spasmodic synth sequences.

"Syntax" is a highlight, seven plus minutes of chilled synthpop with a softly crooning voice wrapping itself around lines like Cadge•gloak, curtal, palliard, patrico, jackman,whip-jack, drummer, click track", lending the words a ridiculous erotic charge. Keeping with the wordy theme, there's a loose and lumpy reading of "Leary Mann from The Vulgar Tongue 118571 by Ducange Anglicus, which works surprisingly well as an ode to contemporary British masculinity. "Pigeon In My Pocket" is a stranger, speedy muddle of noisy electronics and semi-nightmarish post-punk poetry.

The best gag on the album is "Generic Ambient Music", twinkling digital bells and a Vocodered voice cooing, "There's years, literally years, of it, that can be streamed online". Cheeky, clever and a silly bargain for £l on Bandcamp. Go get it.

Leah Kardos

Dilly Dreamers by Philip Sanderson

A new release today on Astres D'or namely Dilly Dreamers by Philip Sanderson. It is my first lathe cut - each record and sleeve made by hand. There are 25 of them, 12 are available now from  Astres D'or and 12 will be available directly from the Snatch Tapes Bandcamp in due course. The 25th copy goes into the archive.

Thematically Dilly Dreamers is four long form sound pieces loosely inspired by the movement of bodies and trains through, in and around the circulatory spaces of Piccadilly Circus underground station. The sleeves were made using a kind of frottage from a braille map of the underground which was produced for a short period by TFL in tech 1990s. 

The snippets of text are 'riffs' on written guides/instruction intended to help the blind negotiate tube stations by highlighting the number of steps between features such as stairs, seats, vending machines and other tactile features of the underground landscape. The texts have a clipped dry poetic quality a tad reminiscent of the shipping forecast.    

At 80 euros this is my most expensive release to date but you are getting a one-off in all senses of the word.