Craven Faults – Erratics ...

Erratics & Unconformities is the first album by Craven Faults.

It follows three EPs: Netherfield Works, Springhead Works and Nunroyd Works. Real-time journeys across decades and continents, and swathes of post-industrial northern Britain.

The journey on Erratics & Unconformities picks up where Netherfield Works left off. We take the canal towpath out of the city. We fork north shortly afterwards. Is this where it started? The terrain gradually becomes more rugged. Familiar. Wild. Evidence of human activity is less immediate in this glacial landscape. It’s there if you seek it. But easy to ignore. If you listen carefully, you can still hear the weight of the ice-sheet carving its way through the rock.

Scepter Studios, Manhattan. September 1967. Vox amplifiers driven to within an inch of their lives. An insistent rhythm. Familiar. Wild. We head across the city to 30th Street Studios a year later. More refined. Capturing a moment four years after its inception. We call into Command Studios in London on an evening in March 1972 before the pace drops. A moment to take in our surroundings. Music born in New York that has travelled beyond our solar system. A sense of weightlessness. We go as far back as 1906. Central Park. Tone poems underappreciated at the time – a visionary. We pay a visit to the village of Wümme in northern Germany. Forward momentum. There’s a nod to the rhythm of the loom. The studio building echoes with its own history by way of an early 70s Elka drum machine. We come to Van Gelder Studio in 1962 by a process of addition and elimination. We stay for the next three years. We’re also put in mind of the time we spent at Dierks Studios in 1972. A treasured record bought at sixteen. It takes time to reveal itself completely. Perhaps it never does. It would be lost now.

8th January 2013 – 19:16 – Farfisa drone through diode filter and phaser – 26 mins 38 seconds

Everything in its own time. The output from the old textile mill Craven Faults calls home is no longer as linear as it once was. There was no clear start point for the project, rather simply rediscovering the joy in experimentation with no material goals. Some of the recordings that make up Erratics & Unconformities go back almost seven years. Tracks have come and gone in that time. They don’t leave until they’ve undertaken a stringent quality control process. It started slowly, but has picked up momentum in the last eighteen months. Recorded and re-recorded to the correct level of imperfection, and then left to breathe. Mixed and re-mixed. Carefully compiled when the time was right.