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Control6580: Retro Electro Roots Revue

Self-described as lo-fi radiophonic blues, Warwick Donald’s Control6580 uses outdated PC gear and Nigel Patterson’s hammond organ to meld scratchy homemade electronic folk music. Tracks are mostly built around Donald’s spindly country & western guitar figures. He employs a laconic vocal delivery somewhat reminiscent of Maynard James Keenan’s Puscifer material to usher the listener into a claustrophobic world. “I've got no chance to care” a maudlin monotone laments. Elsewhere a warning: “Some people are not to be trusted/some people not unlike me.” Furthermore: “No-one will understand – I’ve got no hope left for man”. Could this be the work of a depressive misanthrope? Possibly – in Up Jumped the Devil, the narrator calls on the horned one to help him “make the children suffer, make the women sick”, before burning down the town and enduring a day of rape. Ryan Prebble overlays scything tone generator, which sounds like a shortwave radio being tuned. Donald might get on with the Tom Bosley Experience guys. It’s rampant bedroom experimentalism with a bitter strychnine edge. The set concludes with Screwed Up, a maddening patchwork of fractured vocal sample and pigeon coo percussion. This unhinged approach to music making should only be encouraged, really. A perverse pleasure.

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