Review | “Your Community Hub” by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan

Moody electronica with a civic conscience and a romantic outlook

Just released on the esteemed Castles in Space electronica independent record label, “Your Community Hub", the fifth and latest album in a string of critically acclaimed and popular releases, continues Chapman-Fox’s exploration of the New Towns urban development movement with a sharp focus on community and the erosion of collective infrastructure.

"Your Community Hub" is Chapman-Fox’s most potent work to date, continuing his critical and commercial success and also serving as a powerful commentary on the current state of society via the sonic exploration of various social, societal, and socialist issues raised by the urban planners who dreamed up the New Towns movement in the mid-'70s to the early '80s.

Alternative electronica has long been considered a school of music with a pronounced social consciousness, not least formally, since its production method lends itself to bedroom studio budgets and is thus financially accessible to the working class, as opposed to forms of music that necessitate expensive, and thus elitist, conservatory studies for lessons in traditional instruments and composition.

Sociopolitical awareness is a fundamental characteristic of electronic music, an expansive genre representing the entirety of the experience of surviving in the ruins of late-stage capitalism, including a mind-blowing variety of sounds across infinite purposes, from the most audacious and bracing dance beats to the most esoteric of experimental pursuits.

As a multimodal form of self-expression, electronica, and more so the independent, underground aspects of it, is not always aimed at entertainment, while it can be at once accessible and demanding, both intellectually stimulating and emotionally generous.

In generational terms, evolving rapidly from the avant-garde of the mid-20th century to contemporary mainstream ubiquity, electronica today is the only sound environment that is uniquely native to the post-digital generation, the cohort who grew up listening to autotuned lullabies on TikTok.

Concentrating strictly on the sonic aesthetics and traditions dictated by this existentially all-encompassing and admirably democratic genre, David Chapman-Fox, AKA Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan has been creating music soundtracking a specific narrative about late 20th-century urban culture and its discontents.

Per Chapman-Fox, the music is a lament about the gradual dismantling of post-WW2 idealism about urban regeneration and civic planning, a betrayal of utopian optimism exacerbated by austerity policies, leading to a deep sense of loss for these once-vital spaces and services, as well as the communal spirit they fostered. The album echoes the frustration of people abandoned to fend for themselves, a sentiment that has only grown stronger over time. Accordingly, the music is as much a lament as it is a call to awareness, resonating deeply with those attuned to the social issues of our time.

In a simple but brilliant alignment of period-appropriate aesthetics and sociopolitical statement, the album is convincingly representative as an authentic auditory evocation of this particular context, soundtracking with an almost forensic accuracy the impact that this structural decay had on social cohesion and public well-being.

This particular environmental and contextual framework is suitably illustrated by electronica informed, inspired, and influenced by an iteration of a time-specific variant of electronic music, namely the earliest wave of synthesizer music to transcend academic contexts and infiltrate pop music, a historical turn that happened during the late '70s and early '80s.

It's fitting that the album features the vintage synth aesthetic that is historically aligned, in the revisionist sense of retroactive synchronicity, with the period when the events leading to disappointment with urban modernity unfolded.

The defining creative observation proposed by the Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan project establishes the aesthetic tautology between synthetic music and urban decay by articulating the retrospectively evident observation that the late 20th century is not only definitive in the evolutionary arc of electronic music but also happens to be culturally concurrent with the social manifestations and contingent implications of broken social promises reified as visible monuments of loss in the urban environment.

When Chapman-Fox revisits the optimistic vision that once inspired the planners and architects of Warrington and Runcorn, he discovers desolate ruins whose only appropriate soundtrack is elegiac, mournful, and rueful for what could have been had the shock doctrine of neoliberalist chaos not ushered the death cult of late-stage Capitalism.

In typically romanticist fashion, he also discovers beauty in these remnants of a better future, a possibility sustained perhaps while always hoping for a better past.

The particularly 19th-century century notion of achieving spiritual enlightenment at the sight of ravishing, sublime, revelatory vestiges of fabricated glories was last revived via the New Romantic / Blitz scene, whose immediate artistic forefathers were neither the Beatles nor Elvis but Kraftwerk, Conny Plank, Bowie, and punk.

This changing of the cultural guard happened in the late '70s, and early '80s, when electronic music started to transcend the boundaries of its avant-garde niche and boldly entered the realm of pop charts, becoming the soundtrack of teenage bedrooms and communal spaces like youth clubs, pubs, and other areas where popular music unites disaffected youth and other sociopolitically marginalized groups who are creatively questioning their environment.

Today, this particular strain of Euro-centric romanticism about the betrayal of memory to history continues via the constantly expanding and evolving hauntological scene, best exemplified by the Ghost Box record label contingent.

The urban planners working in this shifting cultural context, soon to spawn entirely new semantic layers such as the internet, video games, virtual reality, and social media, envisioned community centers within a five-minute walk from every home, a planning concept that predated contemporary discussions of fifteen-minute cities by decades.

The intervening years since that brief era of urban regeneration have seen a decline in community centers and services, caused by successive governments that have undermined and eroded basic social structures, often displacing them via gentrification, and supplanting them with nebulous online presences that, ironically, are supposed to facilitate human contact but ultimately reify the inescapable surveillance and alienation matrix that micromanages our collective discontent.

Both reflective and poignant, “Your Community Hub” is an apposite soundtrack for processing these harsh realizations, working its magic through intricate yet accessible compositions, and achieving its austere yet elegant structure, reminiscent of Brutalism, while providing a somber emotional testament to the disintegration of shared spaces and experiences with an all-enveloping soundscape resonant with minimal synth phrases, their charming simplicity arpeggiated and modulated ad infinitum, over layers of time-delayed pads and otherworldly choirs, adding up to a potent and cinematic aural environment reminiscent of Global Communications, Paul Williams, Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, and Vangelis.

The album is also a visual experience, featuring photographs from the archive of architect Peter Garvin, showcased in the sleeve design. These images of the Castlefield Community Centre, a sleek modernist structure, complement the themes of the music, offering a stark reminder of what once was and what has been lost.

Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, June 2024