(2017) The Physics House Band - Mercury Fountain

Review: Since the release of their debut record Horizons/ Rapture in 2013, The Physics House Band have been spoken of in hushed reverence amongst connoisseurs of psychedelic, experimental math- rock. Guitarist Samuel Organ, bassist Adam Hutchison and drummer Dave Morgan met whist studying music in Brighton. The trio were initially jamming as part of a five-piece (with a vocalist and an additional guitarist) but it soon became clear that the quintet’s musical sensibilities were at odds with one another. ‘ Their second record Mercury Fountain fulfils the brief the trio set upon in their early days exquisitely; a cataclysmic, cyclical odyssey that spirals in and out of kaleidoscopic pockets, serene ambience and frenetic, apoplectic wig-outs, all in the space of half an hour. There’s a very free-form nature to the music that The Physics House Band create, with the bulk of material being written and arranged on the fly in the studio. Considering there’s no master plan, it’s astonishing that the band managed to make the music on Mercury Fountain sound like one long cohesive piece. ‘I struggle to listen to a full instrumental album that’s broken up into 12 separate tracks,’ says Organ. ‘I think it’s easy to get a bit lost, I often struggle to find a narrative through-line. But if you have a longer arrangement that’s split up into different sections which all come together, it can achieve its own narrative rather than trying to fill that that space with a vocalist.’ There is a narrative thread that underpins the record however, a spaced-out hallucinogenic journey that encompasses parallel universes, the astral plane and an allegory of emerging from the titular Mercury Fountain only to dive straight back in again (if you play the record on repeat, it loops back on itself seamlessly). Organ and Morgan confess that the majority of these ideas emerged from the mind of the absent Hutchison, mainly as a means to form some sort of cohesion from the madness.

Tracklist: 01 Mobius Strip.flac 02 Calypso.flac 03 Holy Caves.flac 04 Surrogate Head.flac 05 A Thousand Small Spaces.flac 06 Obidant.flac 07 Impolex.flac 08 The Astral Wave.flac 09 Mobius Strip II.flac

Summary: Country: uk Genre: post-rock, psychedelic rock