Steve Bates — All The Things That Happen

All The Things That Happen comes in a smart gatefold card wallet, decorated with photographs of various things with contrasting textures: a wall, a window, a tree, a dandelion head, a spiked plant, and a dog - all presented in interesting, contrasting colours. It’s a neat visual representation of the album within. Bates constructed it, according to the label spiel, ‘primarily with the self-imposed limitation of a Casio SK-1’ - a crude early home sampling keyboard that I myself own and will one day sell for millions of pounds to an eager circuit-bender. The album has nine tracks, with the shortest just clearing two minutes and the longest nearing seven minutes, all are electronic and blur ambient sounds and ideas with more noisy territories.

The opener, ‘Groves of...everything!’, is a nice little Casio drone with smaller sounds flitting in and out that are more electroacoustic and processed; these sound ‘digital’ but wonky, and the overall effect is pleasant and engaging - I feel like it would have been at home on Kranky during their heyday. The next track, ‘These problems are multiplied by the difficulty I have in front of a tape recorder’, shifts to different textures, with alluring murk and muffle, and melodies disintegrating, or emerging into the piece whilst breaking up. The whole piece shimmers and modulates, a characteristic found across the album. ‘Glistening’, one of the two tracks that go past six minutes, is decidedly noisier, with submerged beats, waves of distortion, and at points overwhelming saturation; I’m tempted to announce ‘Flying Saucer Attack played on Casio’s’ with journalistic over-confidence… The next work, ‘Covered in silt and weed’, is more restrained, with a welcoming drone built from singing tones; it’s warm and uplifting, but also comes with a tinnitus-inducing high-pitched whine. Halfway through, a clear melodic section begins, a bold harmonious passage in the album thus far, nodding to ambient’s past. ‘Destroy the palace’ starts off positively angelic, with reverbed harmonies probably not a million miles from Dungeon Synth, building towards saturation before again dying down; that sense of composition and layering is also found in ‘Glimpse an end’ which features more complex lines and contrasting textures, weaving around each other to space-y effect. Next up, ‘Bring on black flames’ pushes the noisy aspects of the album further, with an opening section of obliterated keyboard lines which proceed to cut in and out, pan, loop, and judder; here Bates is definitely attempting to be more viscerally noisy, and indeed present a noise track, but it doesn’t really hit the target. In the context of the album its certainly noisy, and there are even cut-up dynamics, but doesn’t approach the work of, for example, Chris Goudreau. The penultimate piece, ‘We do not, nor to hide’ again nods towards noise as a genre, beginning with a thick low end drone which develops to be overlaid with smaller, more articulate sounds (including brief passages of very nice trebly textures), and a very 80’s digital sounding lead line which occupies the foreground. ‘September through September’ is the final, and shortest track, returning to ambient atmospheres, with layers of warm lines, lapping like waves; it feels like the kind of track that will drift along forever, but it’s over before you know it.

This is a good little album, and I realise that sounds patronising but I don’t mean it to be: the tracks are often short, and the strong presence of an outdated, primitive Casio gives it a ‘bedroom’ feel - despite the album spiel often reaching towards more ‘high art’ associations. Those ‘bedroom’ resonances - ‘FSA on Casio’s’ - give All The Things That Happen an intimacy and sense of free experimentation, though I’ll admit that this is tempered by a simultaneous awareness that the production, whilst often assuming lo-fi qualities, is anything but low fidelity. So there’s an effective tension between an approach that is often raw and noisy, and that awareness that the whole album is meticulously crafted and produced. It bridges a gap between labels like Kranky, and acts like Yellow Swans and Emeralds (both name-checked on the cover sticker), and if that resonates there’s something here for you.