Moon Zero
Moon Zero
The music spools out of Garratts mind in the form of extensively screwed up synthesizers, bowed cymbals, liquidated instruments and detuned tape loops. Bounced between effects chains, music software, mixing desks and tape, his materials are then inflated and tampered with, in different venues of a particular significance or suggestive atmosphere. The results are enigmatic, hypnotic and register a note of mourning. They are mercifully free of the obligatory club references of electronic music thats destined for a different mood but nonetheless confines itself to bygone post-club tropes. "I was listening to a lot of William Basinski, Bowie's 'Low', Swans, Messiaen, Stars of the Lid, Cluster, Eno. Carl Sagan," remembers Garratt. Garratt seeks out spaces in the city which can be turned into echo chambers for his ambient, avant-gardist material. Yearning to derive some meaning from a point in space-time, these resonances turn back and pacify some of the frenzied and alienating forces in both the human and the place. Like the preceding EPs, Moon Zero was recorded at St George in the East in Shadwell, London. Having written the preliminary tape loops (this time secluded and out-of-signal in rural Wales) at the end of 2014, he returned to St George in June 2015. "I only had a five hour window to record everything, which I hope gives the record a sense of spontaneity and life". Religious themes pervade the album, drones imported from ancient sects and the never-silent industrial era - a convergence that is mirrored by the dead history of the Thames and present-day flows of money and data outside his Limehouse studio.