Orphic Signals - Sounds of the Neutron (2017)

After two albums of electro-acoustic ambience as The Ashes of Piemonte back in 2013 (on Time Released Sound and Twice Removed), Lee Norris and Wil Bolton return under the new guise of Orphic Signals, a more purely electronic, hardware-based project.

'Sounds of the Neutron' blends influences from ambient, drone, detroit techno, Berlin school and the BBC radiophonic workshop. A palette of analogue sequencers, loopers and vintage analogue keyboards plays slowly pulsing arpeggios and melodies, blurred and washed out with multiple reverb and delay pedals into droning, textural space music.

Environmental sounds recorded by Richard Harvey at the Institut Laue-Langevin neutron science research centre in France provide an immersive and eerie backdrop to the music - the sounds of geiger counters and neutron detectors reflected in the walls of concrete blockhouses and control cabins. This is the sound of machines adrift, a hazy psychotropic soundtrack to a sci-fi vision of a lone scientist working on an abandoned space station.