Polestar: "Music for Abandoned Factories"

Happy New Year and RIP Polestar. Bristol’s Jon Elliott has been intermittently releasing sweet, über-collectable electronica for six years now, but for him 2011 signifies the year to pack up shop. Nothing to do with the VAT hike, he insists, but it still feels like a harsh decision when measured against the energy of his music. Polestar’s succulent, complex beats were like Alka-Seltzer for the ears, and also weren’t afraid to spy on pop while dabbling with ever-smarter drum patterns. Elliott’s final release seems to mirror the shifting pop industry itself, paying homage to the grand Bristol warehouses which have been threatened with development since his childhood. It’s strange to think that “exciting sites for luxury apartments” could reach the city where they built the Treasure Island ship. It’s even stranger to think that Elliott was once a genuine roughneck himself, spending many a happy hour melting cocoa in the chocolate factory until Kraft outsourced the Oompa-Loompas.

Perhaps feeling as mischievous as he did during his chocolate-making days, “Music for Abandoned Factories”—the start of side B on ...Era—finds Polestar fooling you with a round of nostalgia: crisp, antique synthesisers from public TV that make you think you’re watching a glass-blowing documentary. However, the frantic click-track and rim-shots of bass are too wild for kiln fires and soda-lime, and by the time the piece is up on its legs you’re looking at a smashed church window—one set to the same chords as the average Status Quo song. And that’s “Abandoned Factories” in a nutshell, looping for a further three minutes before shaking off its layers, slowly fading and leaving you with one tinkling keyboard. The music’s brief life is the antithesis of the destroyed industries it references, and as you come to the end of its warm ride you think perhaps it is time for something new (after all, fidgety electro-nostalgia is so 2003). Still, it’s a fitting goodbye from synth nerd Polestar, and if there isn’t a Horizon special about atomic accelerators that doesn’t use this as its soundtrack then atomic accelerators aren’t fun anymore. Elliott should’ve blown out the scientists and sent this direct to Jeff Bridges. This is basically how Tron:Legacy should have sounded before someone gave Daft Punk an orchestra.