Plinth’s “Collected Machine Music” is the latest from Aquarius-beloved label Time Released Sound, whose releases are as much art as music, an insane amount of time and energy put into the packaging for every release. This one comes from an artist called Plinth, whose strange and wondrous music is created using a collection of calliopes and Victorian music boxes, antique sound makers and wheezing creaking mechanisms from way back when.
Haunting and mysterious, chiming melodies are laid over the whir of strange machines, it’s almost like the soundtrack to some bizarre mechanical workshop, a steam punk wonderland, where all the sounds are created via gears, and automatons, a Rube Goldberg-like world of contraptions that create melodies, unfurling whirring textures, and the clicking and creaking of clockwork music boxes, the sound of the machines as much a part of the recordings as the music the machines are making. Dreamy and otherworldly, every song here like some old-timey lullaby, broadcast via wireless from another dimension, the sound of faded memories and lost childhoods, soundtracks to dreams and visions of what once was, bells and chimes, tinkling melodies, all wreathed in static and crackle, as if captured directly off the Victrola, or straight out of the music box, recorded onto a wax cylinder and played back by candlelight in the parlor. So lovely.
Plinth: “Collected Machine Music”