"That’s what music’s for, to move your headspace around and this release does it brilliantly."
- Adrian Bloxham, Fighting Boredom
www.fighting-boredom.co.uk/album-review/uk-subs-plan-pony-freak-yer-ears-out-the-best-of-rebels-volume-5-rosie-tee-empty-house-corridor-tibshelf-album-reviews/
"Electric Swampland Home revels in incongruity, in awkwardness, in otherness, and in many ways, it’s a magnificent representation of life in all its colours and chaos."
- Christopher Nosnibor, Aural Aggravation
auralaggravation.com/2024/04/24/plan-pony-electric-swampland-home/
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Heralded by Dan Holloway’s arresting cover artwork, Electric Swampland Home is the first album from Plan Pony. You may know Plan Pony aka Jason Kester from Omnibadger, the contemporary industrial noiseniks whose 2023 LP Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III threw the Einstürzende Neubauten rulebook at the computer age. Those familiar with Omnibadger will find traces of that project’s oeuvre on this LP - an ear for brilliantly unusual textures, a finely-tuned balance of rhythm and noise - but Electric Swampland Home transports us to altogether headier climes.
On this record we journey to a place of liminal exploration, a village populated by night spirits, ‘Mud Lily’ and the ‘Amphibiman’. It's a bug-eyed and sometimes unsettling listening experience, at once vividly colourful and yet quicksilver, hard to pin down. However, underneath the album's warping heat-haze lies a playful and enticing energy, one which guides musician and listener to a state of something like euphoria come the close.
Kester’s tools for creating Electric Swampland Home were at once modest and meticulously selected. Keen to invoke the gauzy sampledelic majesty of records such as Madvillain’s Madvillainy and J Dilla's Donuts, Kester worked outwards from a Boss 303 Dr Sample sampler to begin crafting these cuts. Tunnelling down into the capabilities of this small but mighty machine, Kester soon began to augment the resulting beat experiments with live percussion and snatches of vocals.
Kester did so while simultaneously forgoing too much premeditation; “I liked the idea of electronica and very earthy natural sounds going together,” says Kester. “Eventually I started to drift into a little world, and that world became this album. I normally listen back to things I've recorded and immediately hear what should be changed, but for some reason I just liked the music instead of being critical. I'm so used to raging about the state of the world/my mind and making bludgeoning sounds - but this was an escape, no comment on anything.”
The result is a record which joins the dots between the outré explorations of Madlib’s most adventurous plunderphonics and acts like Hype Williams or Model Home. You'll be hard pushed not to be charmed by a delightfully dinky exploration such as ‘Mud Lily’; ‘Same Cloud’s bugged-out grind slurps up everything from blues-rock to the Beach Boys into a soupy churn; the run of ‘8pm Local Time’ and ‘Night Spirits’ drops us into a sunken place of eerie chirruping and far-off incantations - it’s the forest at night heard through a peyote haze.
When one takes into account the equipment used to make Electric Swampland Home and the moth-eaten fourth-worldism of the outcome, it's a delight to find that this record also has one thinking of Animal Collective’s golden period. The simultaneously careful and carefree feel to the worldbuilding soundscapes of ‘Travelling There’ and ‘The Village’ invoke albums like Feels and Panda Bear’s Person Pitch. Both of those LPs were masterful at bringing the bliss while also challenging and thrilling the listener through strange and complex sonics - in Electric Swampland Home, they have a worthy heir.
RIYL: Animal Collective, Madlib, Nurse With Wound, Hype Williams, Black Dice
Words by Fred Mikardo-Greaves