Synthetic Villains: Smoker’s Children – Album Review

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Synthetic Villains : Smoker’s Children

(Flood Of Sound Recordings)

DL | ST

Out now

Synthetic Villains’ ninth album delivers instrumental electronica that recalls a time when children lived in a world of imagination and danger from their relatives.

Synthetic Villains return with their ninth album of instrumental electronica. Over the previous eight albums, they have veered between drone and synth-pop, creating soundscapes of whimsy, repetitious textures and memory-inducing musical prompts. Richard Turner, the man behind the Synthetic Villains, describes Smoker’s Children main influences as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the John Baker Tapes, FC Judd, Daphne Oram’s ‘Oramics’ and early electronic music. The title itself is a throwback to those days when kids’ lives were daily put at risk from their relatives chain-smoking happily in living spaces that gradually became more yellow over time. A time when toys could be taken apart and cause scars for life, playing on landfill sites and swimming in any body of water was considered normal. And yet, with all that unnoticed danger, the world for children was filled with imagination and adventure and where “we were unwittingly being prepared for a future that was no longer there once we were adults. But we were expected to use our imagination and entertain ourselves. And that’s essentially what this (Smoker’s Children) is, in sonic form.”

Across 30 tracks in just 29 minutes, the Synthetic Villains take us on a journey through a past that has become a foreign country. There is the wistfulness of I Remember When The Future Was Something To Look Forward To, and the industrial sounds of I’ve Her Cutlery (surely a tribute to Ivor Cutler) with its steam engine sound that made work feel attractive to kids, and the hammering DIY of Barkerliting. There are the cartoon tunes of Once Is Nothing, Cyclical Pattern Selections and the gloriously named Collywobbles, with its jerky, collapsing noise. The titles alone are worth the admission fee, including the classic advice from parents such as Make Your Own Fun (all well and good until the fun destroys the house), with its weird creature sounds, You Have Been Warned, which sounds like a proclamation and ends with the sound of crows fighting over the corpses of those who wouldn’t listen, Now Breathe Deeply, the thoughtful Why Learn The Truth The Hard Way?, and the ultimate fear inducing comment that If The Wind Changes, Your Face Will Stay Like That Forever, which sounds as though you are struggling, pushing against that fearsome wind.

It’s a great collection of electronica, creating a mood music soundtrack to drift away into the past with on a susurrus of sounds. So, if you’re having a touch of the collywobbles after being hit by a wind that left your face with the same expression for eternity, put your feet up, light up a Player’s Navy Cut, and listen to Smoker’s Children and believe, for a moment, that the future is as bright as it seemed when you sat playing with your toy soldiers amidst a fug of smoke billowing from your parents, aunties and uncles mouths in a room with a Bakelite telly and an upright piano covered in rings from beer bottles.

You can find Synthetic Villains on Bandcamp and Instagram.

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All words by Mark Ray. More writing by Mark Ray can be found at his author archive. And he can be found on Instagram.

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