Review | “Building a New Town” by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan
More paeans of exurban lyricism and retro-futurist folk
This EP is the fifth release by the prolific and acclaimed Gordon Chapman-Fox under the Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan moniker.
Ηis latest record, released on Castles in Space in late 2023, οpens with a gentle acoustic guitar that evolves towards a swirling electronic arpeggio, immediately announcing its theme of combined acoustic and synthetic sounds, consistently sustained across four beautiful tracks.
The entire record follows through with this unexpected take on urban romanticism, an eccentric sensibility about modernity and its counterintuitive potential for Arcadian idylls, a Weltanschauung capable of appreciating the irresistibly picturesque charm of otherwise utilitarian spaces, such as the filmic appositeness of a parking lot at dusk.
Occasional swirling synths and electronic effects sprinkle a little science fiction sparkle on the overall somber proceedings, adding an artificial sheen to what is quite a departure from the mainly analog synth sounds of “The Nation's Most Central Location”, the immediately previous LP by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, itself progress towards a warmer, more lyrical sound evolving steadily away from the Berlin school of electronic purism prevalent in the preceding “Districts, Roads, Open Space”, “People and Industry” and “Interim Report March 1979” LPs.
Adhering to an esoteric history of historic disappointment manifested as a preoccupation with the broken promises of concrete urbanism, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development continues a conceptual fixation with the artificial aesthetics, synthetic acoustics, and displaced psychogeography of urban sprawl and social engineering.
This latest release is charmingly surprising because it superimposes acoustic lyricism onto the JG Ballard landscape, creating the audio equivalent of a Fragonard garden folly unexpectedly yet delightfully sprouting in the middle of a deserted shopping mall.
The welcome lightness of guitar strumming, bright arpeggios, and chords in major keys evokes a longing for inner city pastoral idylls, a thematic concern not exactly about imagining a better life in urban spaces but believing in a mystical state of spectral idealism, entranced by the picturesque potential of frivolity among the ruins.
Examining the Utopian and transcendent elements of these particular late-capitalist visions, what emerges as a constant sonic ethos is the soothing influence of new-age music, a genre long ago relegated to a lower critical status, dismissed as niche music with intellectual pretensions above its semi-religious qualifications.
Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan dares to propose a revisionist examination of new-age music, re-purposing its spiritual/cosmic philosophy in the service of humanitarian enlightenment, even daring to include the utilitarian aspect of music expressly composed as an aid to meditation and relaxation.
Undeniably then, this is contemporary spiritual music for a secular church of daydreamers, creating ambivalent sounds that both echo and interrogate the bleak landscape of modernity, quasi-ironically cheerleading for sociopolitical progress via civil initiative, perversely deconstructing a tradition of consciously aestheticized propaganda initiated more than a century ago by the Futurists, whose unavoidably antiquated prophecies, polemics and screeds notoriously heralded an evolutionary leap for humanity signified by the supremacy of machines, the mysticism of technology and the advancement of industry.
At the other end of this enthusiasm, capturing a pensive mood evocative of the charmingly delusional aspect of post-war hopes for a better future, the music of Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan is representative of a more 21st-century sensibility, a critique about the decidedly contemporary preoccupation with the aspirational, and mainly elusive, promises of environmentally, socially aware and aesthetically conscious gentrification, red zoning and privatization under the guise of city planning, as if we don't know about the previous failures of this kind of mega-projects, as if the affluent promises of any capitalism-adjacent lifestyle are still valid.
The answer to whatever question is posed by these long-standing affectations and mannerisms is a further re-construction of what has already proven to be false, yet continues to be invented as the mythology of our localized past, present and future.
The circumstantial artifacts of these records, like liner notes, track titles, sleeve designs, and associated art, clearly emulate the parochial aesthetics of town planning brochures, the crumbling facades of municipal initiatives, leaning in the experimental whimsy of local educational productions, such as nature or industrial documentaries for county TV channels or incidental music for pirate radio station advertisements, logo-tones and test signals, some directly imitating the tone of public announcements, all of them serenading the modernist atmosphere of community architecture, citizen media and above all, tomorrow.
(Similarly, such wishful deceptions about the romantic appeal of failed seriousness after the fact are encountered in Ostalgie retro kitsch, a popular trend fetishizing East Germany communist aesthetic and imagery after the 1989 fall of the Berlin War, a post-Cold War consumerist aberration that obsessed the West German middle class who was suddenly discovering the pleasures of state-sponsored synth-pop, fashion magazines published via government committee or standard-issue KGB-approved décor, all leaving a bizarre aftertaste of a slightly different flavor of Western hope for a better future.
Simultaneously, in a visual and architectural sense, the same aesthetic re-consideration was afforded to the brooding style and imposing bleakness of former Soviet state structures, tower blocks, propaganda monuments, and vanity projects.
This was a trend peripherally popular in the '80s and '90s with style nerds and other marginal aesthetes mistaking the spectacular principles of these forms of oppression as if they were imposing temples of Brutalist chic, merely locations for fashion photography as opposed to the wrecks of a failed ideology.
Today, the same Cement Gothic aesthetic has survived and evolved into the contemporary virality of internet backrooms and liminal-core aesthetics, bringing a new, non-aligned, and apolitical sense of uncanny displacement, gloomily lit by flickering office lights.
In music, the fin-de-siècle roots of this desolate, Neo-romantic, post-industrial aesthetic are most recently heard in the '90s alternative electronica scene, exemplified by such groups as Boards of Canada and Broadcast, or Warp Records and other so-called “intelligent” music labels.
Before that, '70s Krautronica, ambient, new age, and library music were the main purveyors of deviant electronica and techno blues.
Continuing in the same vein Ghost Box Recordings, founded an astonishing two decades ago, is the main representative today of this so-called hauntological obsession with institutional daydreaming and late 20th century (sub)urban romanticism.)
Melancholic about nostalgia for a brighter and more prosperous future that never came to be, this time-traveling frame of mind acts as a retroactive continuity device, a narrative flourish that unfurls the modern urban landscape, like a Chinese scroll, marking the desolate expanse as haunted by the ghosts of spurned optimism.
Gordon Chapman-Fox is not only an exemplary representative of this genre, but most importantly, a musician who broadens the tonal horizon, adding his transformative chiaroscuro, brilliantly re-imagining an already existing view in his own, delicate, interpretation.
Original Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, January 2024