Ron Berry spent a good chunk of the 80s designing and building analogue synths, drum machines and speakers in the UK, and as luck would have it he was also spending a good chunk of that chunk composing music on said equipment and recording it. So here we have the first of his first two albums, which were both recently reissued by Oakland’s Sanity Muffin imprint, and it’s a real retro-lectric odyssey. With the sheer volume of great komische/kraut minimal synth music happening in Germany (see: Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, et. al.) and Italy too, really (Moroder), it’s a bit of a surprise to hear this coming out of Manchester, relatively around the same time period, and also sounding so well executed. Berry’s music slides gracefully through a number of moods and styles, from smooth ambient soundscapes to prickly psuedo-noise tracks and then a couple of up-tempo rollicks that give a pretty strong Atari and NES video game soundtracks nostalgia vibe. Throughout, there’s a multitude of textures that, though related to one another as pitches on a scale, give each track a nice depth with layers allowing for music that might be stereotyped as planar a three-dimensional architecture. It’s a silicon landscape you’re free to roam, walk around in, take a nap or just stare up into twinkling abyss of ones and zeros.
More about: Ron Berry
