Cultural Amnesia: Did You Hear The Music (Ice Cream For Crow Records, 2025)
It was great to see the return of Cultural Amnesia this year, eight years after the release of their last album. The trio of Gerard Greenway, Ben Norland and John Peacock has a long and varied history. Originally active between 1980 and 1983, Cultural Amnesia were part of the British post-punk underground scene, dispensing experimental synth pop with an industrial edge. Their milieu was the cassette culture, a network that took full advantage of the ubiquity of the compact cassette and the affordability of multi-track recording equipment. During those three years they recorded some 130 songs, but only released about 50 of them, many of which later resurfaced via LP and CD anthologies of their work such as Enormous Savages and Press My Hungry Button.
Sometime in the late 1990s the group reunited to make occasional new recordings, which have been emerging sporadically ever since. Did You Hear The Music is the latest of these – a return to their roots, released as it is on cassette (plus the inevitable digital download). It appears to be some kind of concept album, with the two sides of the tape labelled Outer and Inner, and the four songs on each side concerned with external and internal realities respectively. Lyrically, the Outer side is all force fields, mathematics and covert surveillance; in this unsettling world, human relationships are at risk from shadowy systems of power and control. As “Every Body” assures us, no matter how hot and sexy you are, you’ll end up making flowcharts in a closed loop. The oddly tender “Hyacinth Boy” is a plea for attention from some besotted admirer whose tentative romantic advances end up feeling like “a reaction in the heart of matter... my whole system’s at breaking point.”
Flip the tape and we’re taken to the Inner side, where things get more up close and personal. Another suitor, perhaps the one that we met in “Hyacinth Boy”, steps up to make their case in “Baby, I’m Cursed”, but they’ve since mutated into some kind of nihilistic force: “I’ve got nothing to offer, I’ve got a hole in my head.” Unsurprisingly, by the time the lengthy closing track “Blues” comes around, our lover is doomed to solitude, “so lonesome all the time, like I’m yearning for a love long gone.” The title track, meanwhile, senses the presence of music, but is uncertain of its origin: “where did it come from, undersea or in the breeze, somewhere in the body?”
Musically Cultural Amnesia sound as arresting as ever, with Greenway’s eccentric-schoolmaster vocals riding on waves of gaunt synth melodies and minimalist electronic percussion. There’s a sharp inventiveness at work here, sly touches of guitar and woodwind augmenting the electronic textures and lending the album a tense, fidgety sound that’s entirely in keeping with the discursive bite of the lyrics. You can even dance to it in places, although you may prefer to take in the enveloping ambient drift of “Beston Forest”, the blasted Jandek-style loner folk of “Blues” or guitarist Peacock’s gorgeous Robert Fripp-style electric lead lines on “They Know What They’re Doing” – a comparison that makes sense when you learn of Peacock’s association with Fripp’s Guitar Craft stable.
Recorded between 2013 and 2015, these eight songs are drawn from the group’s archive of post-2000 recordings. Given their evident enthusiasm for documenting and curating their past activities, there may well be more to come from Cultural Amnesia. I certainly hope so.
https://culturalamnesia.bandcamp.com