I’ve been meaning to post about Matt Saunders‘ new(ish) Patterned Air Recordings imprint for a while now but work is taking over at the moment. Suffice to say that after The Assembled Minds’ debut release late last year he’s just released the second and third in the catalogue back to back. CukoO and Running On Air couldn’t be further apart stylistically but they make sense when tied together in the elaborate CD packaging that Matt assembles for each release.
Taking up the baton from labels like The Folklore Tapes or A Year In The Country, each pouch contains multiple items that enhance the release in some way, hand printed, stamped, signed, numbered and then tied with a leather strip. They’re a nightmare to store and get into but there’s nothing out there quite like them and the label mission statement on their website reads like a ‘Hauntology 101’. “We are a record label interested in weird things. We like analogue synths, reel-to-reel machines, Radiophonics, music for children, music for falling to sleep by, early electronic experiments, folkloric eeriness, seances, electronic voice phenomenon, old techno, deteriorated music — in a nutshell, soundtracks to get us off this mundane plain and onto an elevated, if creepy, state of euphoria”.

I’ll buy that for a dollar but there’s more at work here than that – the music is just as unique as the packaging, sitting somewhere between earthy folk, spine-chilling electronica and the kind of melodic, stately British nostalgia found in Grasscut‘s records. Labels like this are always fun at the beginning because they’re full of ideas, idealism, experiments and no musical formula in place. These are all still available from the label’s Bandcamp page.