Monty Adkins: "Forensic Embers"

Anyone familiar with Ennio Morricone’s The Thing (1982) score will know you can squeeze a lot of tension out of a single note. OK, so the film’s scenes of Kurt Russell going stir crazy/stop-motion head spiders brought plenty of menace on their own, but there’s no denying the film became slightly icier thanks to Morricone’s bleak monotone overdubs.

Monty Adkins must’ve rented The Thing at a very inappropriate age, because his sound—“slow shifting organic, instrumental and concrete soundscapes”—mirrors the Antarctic horror film so accurately you can almost hear penguins trying to flee from it. Adkins spent his degree years taking single noises and converting them into complex drone operas, resulting in his work being farmed out and given lots of art spots in France. After a short break playing e-guitar in Paris, Adkins has gone back to his favourite whiteouts for sophomore album fragile.flicker.fragment, where single notes enjoy extraordinary production, like Ennio Morricone striking a power chord and then running outside to catch the fade.

Unusually for an ambient record, Adkins has decided to telegraph his album with a decade, and as soon as “Forensic Embers” begins it’s obvious we’re deep in the ’80s. The mix of drone, pads and slow laser scanners could easily be a Knight Rider cue, and by the time the synthetic rain effects come in you’ll want to cry “Vangelis impersonator!” But Adkins lets his soundscapes glow and boil over, going into places TV pop culture avoids. All that time in French art galleries has altered his vision, allowing him to play with the track’s titular darkness in a way that would make the titular pathologists uncomfortable. And although the detail on “Forensic Embers” might not be original enough to get a murder conviction reversed, it’s certainly a good enough alternative to the retro copycats of the ’80s, who only want to wipe out crime and aliens and keep David Hasselhoff alive.