There’s a real sense of delicacy to On Prescription, the new album by Hawksmoor. It manages to straddle various genres of instrumental music without falling prey to the usual traps. It’s electronic and dreamy without the overbearing nods to Tangerine Dream and it’s softly lullaby-ish without being plain boring. It pulses like motorik without merely retreading those narrow confines.
It’s tempered with soft post-punk edges which are reminiscent of spending the night with The Cure, The Durutti Column and Young Marble Giants, reading books by a dim light. It also tingles and shimmers like sneaking around in Metal Gear Solid.
Gently percussive with blurry objects in your peripheral vision. It’s persuasive in a mellow manner, never demanding your attention, but taking it anyway. The only exception is the closer ‘Hertzumol’ which throbs like the opening credits of a thriller set in LA, before descending into realms of a thoughtful Scandinavian murder drama.
Whilst being electronic, there is still warmth under the skin of On Prescription, like Rick Deckard’s (possibly) beating heart.
Referring to individual songs is a little redundant as the album is one big cafetiere, this is music that percolates for a deep roast.
https://spunoutofcontrol.bandcamp.com/album/on-prescription
And as profits go to Cancer Research there is no excuse!!
We caught up with master sound-smith James McKeown to talk about the album!
The drug titles are anagrams, approximations etc. Is this to add a degree of distancing or unreality?
As I write in the album liner notes, the names of the drugs were the way into the project. The names of Chemotherapy drugs are so strange; it wasn’t hard to come up with new names that were a mixture of existing drugs, anagrams or a jumble of names to form fictional drugs. The effects tied to each and reflected in the music for each track title are redolent of the side effects – which hopefully not too many people will be familiar with. Also using these titles saves me from getting into litigation territory with large pharmaceutical companies!
What equipment did you use on the album. From song writing, studio time to the end product, how long did ‘On Prescription’ need?
Aside from the ‘live’ instrumentation of bass and guitar, it is predominantly semi-modular Moog equipment. Initial sketches of ideas were started towards the end of 2020. It was then fully mixed and mastered by the spring of 2021 and the biggest delay was then around design/artwork due to the huge demand for the amazing artwork of Eric Adrian Lee. We are seeing some delays with the physical cassettes too as a result of a greater demand which has massively increased, maybe as a result of vinyl production becoming almost untenable.
You seem to have found the perfect home at Spun At Sounds…?
I love working with Gavin at Spun Out of Control. He just ‘gets’ it and is equally creative with ideas and concepts for each release. The ‘Ivo Watts-Russell’ of the cassette world.
Congrats on the soundtrack to Concrete Island with the mighty Heartwood Institute, you must be very proud of the end result!
Absolutely. I think we were both really pleased with the way the whole album came together from what was, essentially, an experiment.
What next for Hawksmoor?
More material and possibly playing live in some form by the end of the year? I have a pure soundtrack album in production and have another album – currently being mastered in Denmark and due for release next year allowing for manufacturing timescales – which taps into Folk-Horror territory – Pagantronica.
Thanks James!
Colourizon covered the aforementioned Concrete Island in this article which imagines it as a 1988 movie by Alan Clarke starring Peter Davison!
Hit the Spun Out Of Control tag below to see everything we’ve covered on that mighty label, and check them out on bandcamp https://spunoutofcontrol.bandcamp.com/
…We love their album art aesthetic!
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