Anduin: "Our Future is a Debt"

With two candles already in its economy birthday cake, the global financial crisis is now in its teething stage, its regulators exhausted and covered in piss. And while musically, the best response to a monetary downturn is obviously going to be busking (mortgage advisers sent on harmonica modules, it’s only a matter of time), the more experimental ditherers out there can add their own twist to proceedings, creating a kind of real-time soundtrack as they gradually pawn off their synthesizers. So step forward Richmond’s Jonathan Lee, whose second release as the ambient Anduin finds him devising a cure for his debt-addled conscience—except here, where he lies down and surrenders to piggy-bank nightmares, his vision swimming with chequebooks. The lion’s share of his new LP Abandoned in Sleep might be a delicious and pulse-steadying sleep aid but this one’s the chili chocolate, the wolf in sheep fatigues with dispensation to keep you from dreaming. It’s notions like these that jab you awake when your catalogue habit turns vicious, erasing your memory of loved ones’ phone numbers and replacing them with special offer product codes.

To Lee, banker’s insomnia is a very real condition. It must be—those bonuses are worth their weight in coke, after all. “Our Future is a Debt” manifests the feeling as a brittle destroyer of sleep: you’re obviously a fuckwit if you work in finance at anywhere other than support level, but if profit and loss is your only calling, here’s what you feel as the numbers stop sliding and you hallucinate an army of creditors. Creeping machines and rotor distortion coil round an ominous beat, a balking drone in place of a drum roll to announce the arrival of The Liquidator. That’s right, dicknosh—you brought down the FTSE; you get to speak to the demigod. A little mellow it may be, but don’t let that fool you: its under-the-radar grinding is more gung-ho than the airport takedown from Modern Warfare 2, more unreasonable than a bailiff. When things are still bleak in another three months and the papers publish more forged expenses, this is the sound MI5 will resort to when interrogating the cashier who squealed. Please don’t hit the preview tab if you’re due at your desk in the morning. Sweet dreams aren’t made of this.