Craven Faults is known for his anonymity, giving rare, select live performances without revealing his identity. He plays with his back, for the most part, to the audience, while manipulating a wall of analogue modular synthesizers. Over the course of several EPs and one other full-length album, he has built a strong following for his deeply atmospheric tracks which express the Yorkshire landscape from which he presumably hails. His new album, Sidings, moves into more stately, sombre territory which suits his simple, yet multi-layered sound down to the stoney Yorkshire ground.
Sidings consists of three long tracks, each around 15 minutes, bookending shorter tracks, with titles recalling the railways. ‘Ganger’ is a slow procession of overlapping beats with an insistent jangle and booming bass register. It is very restrained, progressing and changing gradually as a faint wail creeps into the sequence with a ghostly higher figure repeating in the aether. The restraint builds up tension as the release appears more and more inevitable, but never arrives. Craven Faults is a master at holding back, and leaving us wanting more. The tension racks up another notch on ‘Stoneyman’, which sounds like 1970s library music trapping us in the moment before a cataclysm strikes. The album maintains the same slow, steady tempo throughout, from the foreground chug and distant melody of ‘Up Goods Distant, Down Goods Home’ to the swelling drone and feedback crackle of ‘Drover Hole Sike’. The album speaks of the dignity and steady rhythms of work and the huge reserves of inexpressible experience encoded in traces left on ancient landscapes. Craven Faults seems to play music that describes an inability to articulate emotion, inherent in particular to the lives of men.
The video accompanying the final track, ‘Far Closes’, is a black and white, northern Koyanisqaasti, both in terms of its minimalist sound and sweeping aerial shots as the camera slides over a quarry landscape. The music is quietly ecstatic, with a swelling underlay that pushes emotion through an icy synth landscape. It is surprisingly moving, the culmination of an album that is almost supernaturally focused. The analogue synths sound both divorced from time, and deeply expressive, a contradiction that lies at the heart of Craven Faults music making. Sidings is a powerful statement of love for a place and understanding of its people and history, muted and yearning. Crisp, rich tones leave space for the imagination to flood in, and take us to a location that exists only in the mind. Sidings is Craven Faults’ best, most irresistible work to date.
