The idea of something from Bristol that's influenced by dub does make one reflexively yawn a bit...  but this Young Echo album Nexus is something else.

The way sounds trickle and levitate reminds me more of INA-GRM, your Rissets and such, or perhaps a latterday concrete-mixer like Christophe Charles (of Mille Plateaux). Monolake's Hongkong also sprang to mind.

At least until -- with both these tracks -- the vocals kick in and we're back in familiar Bristolian emotional landscapes: Martina Topley-Bird in a fugue state,  Robert Del Naja with seasonal affective disorder.  Living in one of England's prettiest cities, you'd be a lot more chipper, I'd have thought.

Luckily most of the record is instrumental.

My friend Pat Blashill - photographer and journalist - is building an online archive of his work, called Poison.  Pat currently lives in Vienna, but he started out in Austin, Texas, documenting the local postpunk / posthardcore scene, and then moved to New York, where we first met through doing some assignments for Melody Maker. Which included a profile of George Clinton. 

While looking for a photo of Pat's to post here, I stumbled on this.

 

Fuck me, if this isn't Galaxie 500, posing in  Joy's apartment on East 12th and Broadway, where we lived for most of the Nineties. A well located building, but a fairly drab and poky apartment,  one of whose sole redeeming features was those blinds, which in a darkened room during daylight hours would create mesmerising Op Art patterns, ever-shifting perpendicular bars of light and shade of differing widths, as they rippled very slightly in the eddying updrafts from the air conditioning unit.  You can't see this effect in the photo, obviously, but trust me it was entrancing. Made me come over all Eno-ish, it did, or rather like one of those becalmed, drained-of-will, washed-up/washed-out characters in the slower songs on Another Green World and Before and After Science. This is what one had to do  for amusement before the Internet, kids!