Towards the end of ‘The Blessing’, the opening track on Max Syedtollan and Laurie Tompkins’ The Tank, a cow lets out an anguished moo and all hell breaks loose. What had until that point been a spooky collage of spoken word and environmental sounds erupts into a cosmic carnival as alien electronics and free-wheeling vocalisations bounce around in gleeful havoc. It’s a masterstroke of dramatic timing and sonic cues, the pair toying with what certain sounds signify, turning it on its head and bamboozling us all in the process.
The album forms part of Syedtollan’s ongoing project through his World Service label to reestablish the radio play as a cutting-edge art form. The Tank takes as its theme the world of amateur ufology, which explains the blast of wonky bovine kosmiche closing the opening track.
Unsurprisingly in the context of the pair’s backgrounds, they take a sideways slant on the subject matter. Syedtollan and Tompkins are two vital cogs in the UK’s absurdist background. The former working in surreal, often text-based approaches to ensemble work; the latter delving into a joyous explosion of pop and hyper-abstract vocal techniques. Their solo practices are connected by a composed rather than improvised summoning of oddness.
It’s that sense of a script, however nebulous, that makes The Tank so effective. These collages seldom slip into a linear narrative, but neither are they purely aleatoric. Strange resonances emerge in the relations of sound and language, these pieces feel designed to raise as many questions as they provide answers.
On ‘The Call’, an overlapping description of diarrhoea symptoms becomes oddly moving and slightly haunting, as if they’re getting at a structure of feeling more profound than digestive issues, even if it’s not clear exactly what. A flushing toilet followed by an eerie lamenting choir only adds to the bizarre poignancy. Elsewhere there’s retro sci-fi musical cues in the form of spacey synths and twinkling vibes, or sidesteps into lopsided voice and percussion. Sometimes the connection to ufology is clear, sometimes it’s not. Through the swirling kaleidoscope of testimony, ramblings and weird sonics we’re encouraged to make mental jumps. To revel in this bizarre audio-linguistic riddle.
They toy with the ability of sound and studio to convey an entire world, and upend how we experience our own. Sonically, The Tank feels connected to the surreal hörspiel experiments of Mauricio Kagel, and Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange’s Inventions for Radio broadcasts from the BBC in the mid-1960s. Like those predecessors, Syedtollan and Tompkins explore the potential of sound and language to question and play with how we move through reality in richly layered, provocative and disorientating ways.
