Album Review

Paranoid Foundation – Threads

• 17th Jun 2011

I slip the CD into the stereo, walk away, and then have a little moan about the sound of the drilling that has started from next door.

Except it wasn’t my neighbour drilling at all.

Realising as the low rumbling subsided and slid into an eery percussion that this is how Threads, the new mini-album from Paranoid Foundation, begins, and it indeed continues in much the same vein as a sinister foreboding atmosphere is heaped upon an industrial soundscape.

A brilliantly realised backstory for this collection of 6 songs tells of how the electronic duo produced the album separately.  Whilst one half, Crispin Lee, provided pre-recorded vocals, the other, Andrew Walker, took these and produced the remainder of the track around it during a two-month deployment on a small survey vessel in the South Atlantic Ocean.

The implied hardships of a barren coastline and the confinement of cramped quarters are easily imagined as the sparse electronica seems to move in waves as fragile acoustics ebb and flow against the harsher, colder tones that emphatically echo the conditions it was created in.

At the same time that it is dark and moody, Threads is also an intriguing and entirely listenable experience that thrives on the stark, cold sense of looming dread and lurking trepidation that refrains from alienating those tuning in.