Crooked Acres – 29th March 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Megalithic Transport Network is the vehicle – if you’ll excuse the necessary pun – of Martyn Stonehouse, and as his project’s moniker suggests, Stonehouse has quite a deep-seated interest in transport systems, as well as, more broadly, industrialisation, and what one might call the heritage of production and its progress, with previous works including Excavations On Harthill Moor, and other meditations on geographical / environmental events.
As the accompanying notes outline, ‘Drawing inspiration from the 18th and 19th century mining works at Alderley Edge in Cheshire, Engine Vein explores themes of our industrial past and the myths surrounding the historical site itself, which has been worked since the early Bronze Age up until the 1900s. As well as the mines themselves, the area is full of intriguing features and is steeped in folklore, including the story of The Wizard, The Golden Stone and a Holy Well.’
The tracks titles clearly are directly connected to specific locations, and mark the points at which human geography intersects with physical geography – quite specific instances of man-made interventions imposed upon the landscape, you might say: ‘Descent Assembly’; ‘The Hough Level’; ‘Engine Vein’; ‘West Incline’; Windmill Hollow’. Our relationship with mining has changed substantially over the long centuries. What began as a marvel of development has now become a defining feature of the destruction of the planet by human hands and machinery. But this is how our species is: we always go too far, beyond what’s necessary or sustainable. It’s small wonder there’s a collective nostalgia for bygone days and the deeper recesses of history.
Engine Vein, though, sits in a unique space, between two levels of nostalgia, and the present.
First, as for the method and practicality of its creation, Engine Vein was ‘written as live evolving pieces of electronic sound, each recorded using an AE Modular Synthesiser, Korg MS2000 and Yamaha R100 direct to tape, before being digitally transferred’.
And so it is with Engine Vein that MTN explores a tale of industrial with industrial sounds, and if not necessarily vintage equipment, at least using kit that evokes the spirit and sound of a different kind of industrial, namely that of the late 70s. Engine Vein doesn’t replicate the gnarliest noise of Throbbing Gristle, but the more proto-electro pulsations of cuts from 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
It is, as a listener, difficult to directly correlate the track to their associated locations, for two reasons: first and foremost, there’s no ‘field’ element to the compositions, nothing which is identifiably evocative, nothing which associates the sounds with time or space, period or location. But as much as this, there is the historical gap which sits unbridged – how post-millennial technology emulating the sounds of the late seventies and early eighties connects with the time frame which inspired it.
None of this is to say that Engine Vein is a bad listen: it’s simply better, perhaps, to listen to it separately from its context. It’s rare for a time / place inspired / orientated release to be so overtly beat-driven, and for all the dark shifting ambience which lurks and lingers in the further reaches of the many layers, Engine Vein is a throbbing, pulsating, and quite up-front, energy-strong set which draws as much on 90s dance tropes and rave as it does more primitive 80s forebears.
Of course, for the artist, the experience may be entirely different again: perhaps, for him, this is a listening experience which harks back, back, way back and back further. The title track, with its low, slow pulsations and layered facet, does perhaps speak on another level, and its low, dark throbbing certainly has a resonance which bothers the midriff if not one’s perception of history.
Engine Vein is constructed around a dense sonic haze, throbs and pulses. And at times it’s hard to separate the reality from the recordings, as well as the hazy memories. Dark heavy drones, gouging lines ploughing thick and deep churn the ground to a depth and drag the thick sods over one another. ‘Windmill Hollow’ draws the set to a slow, sludgy conclusion, and leaves you feeling dredged out, tired.
There are manifold depths and layers to explore here, making Engine Vein an album worth spending time with.
AA
Aural Aggravation 