Pure Sound - Submarine [Euphonium Records - 2007]Submarine offers up a curious very English mix of throbbing & wondering bass lines, Guitar workouts that go from jagged slightly punked, to avant, to deathly harmonic strumming. With the odd slightly dated locked drum patterns here and there. All topped with old wartime voice samples, found elements and spoken word. As the inlay notes detail the tracks were primarly built around bass player,tape manipulator Vince Hunts dead uncles collection of world war two based voice recordings. Which include the crackling and atmospherics voices of British pilots, soldiers and well spoken news reporters, that detail wartime stories to more chatty dialogue, to almost instructional spoken word. The four piece build around the voice samples an instrumental pallet along with sampled sounds like submarine noise, radio static, air plane noise ect. With the odd track dropping in the nasally English voices of Pure Sound member's spouting surreal texts or singing repeated texts. The whole project keeps drifting back to feeling of a homemade bedroom project, which in it’s self is ok. But this does tend to show amateurish edges here and there, Giving one the feeling this is very much the work of a group of bored middle aged men. An interesting project that’s a little hit and miss- but offers up enough curious voice recordings and quirky sound manipulations to make it worth a stab- if you enjoy spoken word/ historic sound based projects. Roger Batty
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