Taken Apart

Collapsing layers of city. A system designed to do someone else’s bidding. We humans have to fit in as best we can. The air full of fractured, dismembered speech. Separated from it’s source, lost of it’s meaning. Taken Apart documents sparse city landscapes and the human psyche of 21st century social politics. It incorporates sequences of concrete sound collages and reportage-like location recordings set against layers of string, synth and choir. The follow up to 2015’s Broken Memory Machine, Taken Apart shares many of it’s predecessors traits. However, the reflective romanticism is gone - if Broken Memory Machine was a story from the past, Taken Apart unfolds right here in the wide eyed present, with the listener at the white hot centre of it all. Over the past year I spent a lot of time traveling between the countryside and the city. It felt like a dual existence. The complete calm and almost isolation of the countryside brought the intensity of the city into sharp focus. I began to think about the human being’s place inside this giant construct and the impact this environment had on the people trying to navigate it. One characteristic I particularly noticed was the omnipresence of the human voice - wherever I went someone was speaking, but I could never tell where the voice was coming from. Sometimes it was a long phone conversation that carried down a railway carriage, or a distorted PA announcement from a transport hub concourse, or a talking auto checkout machine that I caught a snatch of as I walked past a supermarket, or a crystal clear, more real than real advertising message from a shop. But I could never see the speaker, instead the air was full with a miss mash of fractured, dismembered speech. Of all the chaotic and intense audio information a giant city transmits, it was these floating voices that seemed the most poignant to me and became the focus of my field recordings (both audio and video) and one of the main themes of the album. - Phil Tomsett