Album review: Polypores 'There are other worlds'

I’d like this blog to help support the DIY electronic music community, so to this end, I’m going to include an occasional album review. First up is the latest from Polypores, ‘There Are Other Worlds’, which has recently been released by the wondrous ‘Castles in Space’ label.  

I was first attracted to Polypores by the name - anyone who refers to themselves as a kind of bracket fungus can’t be all bad. Plus, as a further bonus, he’s from Lancashire. Over the past ten years or so, Stephen James Buckley has released more than 40 albums worth of material under the Polypores banner, on a variety of different labels. He’s also established a firm reputation as a very engaging live performer. 

Like his other recent work, ‘There Are Other Worlds’ provides an immersive journey through multi-layered synth-rich landscapes blended with occasional field recordings. Stephen clearly loves sequencers, and he also loves delays. Nice! But unlike most of the ‘Berlin school’ of sequencer-based synth music that developed in the ‘70s, it is played with wonderfully carefree abandonment. It is propelled forward by a kind of relentless, restless energy. Having found a sequence, or groove, it never stays still for long - unlike some of those Berlin school classics. I suspect that Stephen gets bored easily, so no synth knob remains untweaked for more than a few seconds. Most of the tracks also move forward at quite a brisk pace, so the music is never dull. Indeed, so much happens so quickly it is sometimes difficult to absorb at a single sitting. 

While the music is sometimes floaty and pastoral, even a bit spacey, it’s mostly strongly rhythmic. But what really sets Polypores apart, for me, is his use of melody. This album is simply bursting with melodic ideas and invention. The sequences transform from rhythmic underpinnings into melodic lines and back again, and there are beautiful soaring lead lines that barely seem tethered to the other stuff that’s going on. Nevertheless, it somehow always remains musically coherent - no mean feat. The music is performed on a  Eurorack modular together with his trusty Dreadbox Erebus synth. Given the relatively limited instrumentation, it is also impressive that he generates such timbral variation. Yet it’s his melodic freedom that I particularly admire. It isn’t all that easy to express yourself musically with a modular synth, and Stephen deserves great credit for his ability to do this so effectively.

It’s interesting to consider where this fits in musically. On my Apple Music app it says ‘Unknown genre’, which just about sums it up. His music is sometimes likened to free jazz, reflecting the fact that much of it is improvised. However, given that it’s melodically complex, with virtuosic playing - to me this sounds like a kind of synthy prog. On this album, Stephen has used a limited amount of overdubbing to complement his improvisations, which has definitely provided some additional depth, compared to his previous work. What is striking, though, is how unique this music is. Today (wonderfully) there is no shortage of people experimenting with modular synths, so finding a distinct voice that’s all your own presents something of a creative challenge. Stephen has responded to this challenge magnificently - this sonic world is unquestionably his own. While there is some conceptual background to this release, as befits an album with proggy associations, these ideas strike me more as a creative starting-off point rather than as a guide with which to navigate the music. For me, the other worlds referred to in the title lie somewhere in Stephen’s brain. Its a place of bright colours and rapidly shifting imagery; somewhere rich in imagination, which is apparently also full of dandelions (or the spaces between them, at any rate). This is fantastic work; I loved it.