Kevin Richard Martin - Frequencies for Leaving Earth, Vol​. ​1 (2020)

Kevin Richard Martin(The Bug/King Midas Sound/ Zonal), today launches his own digital label, Intercranial Recordings, with the simultaneous, twin release of ‘Frequencies for Leaving Earth Vol.1’ and ‘Frequencies for Leaving Earth Vol.2’. Both volumes were composed, mixed and produced during the lockdown period. Kevin spent this surreal, intense time, rebuilding his studio and retreating into these alternate sonic realities…

Volume 1 is epically slow. Three graceful tracks that are as beautiful as they are spiritual, existing in a glacial twilight zone, floating between drone, neo-classical, and extremely slo-mo jazz. Sounding like a score for a lost Tarkovsky film, the cavernous spaces between the notes are as seductive as the lush music within the album. It ’s three lengthy pieces are three variations on one haunting, melody..

Alternately Volume 2 is its inorganic opposite, Written for Shepard tone, mellotron and sub bass. This second volume, is far more austere, alien and foreboding, revelling in its praise of the shepard tone and Kevin Martin’s ongoing obsession with scarce sci-fi scores.
The producer ventures further out sonically, into an extra terrestrial deep listening experience, that is fuelled on massive low end gravity and hypnotic tension, but retains a rich vein of soul amidst the tripped, electronic machinery.
It echoes disc two of Techno Animal’s ‘Re-entry’, the spectral ambience of his debut album ’Sirens’ on Lawrence English Room40 label, and at times even sounds like the heaviest dubs applied to an updated BBC Radiophonic Workshop, by a latter day Autechre..
Yup, its a trip.