Experimental synth project Morse Code Band dealt with this year’s lockdown by performing live sets to audiences of zero and capturing the results on tape. Pandemic Residency, out now on Inside/Outpost, is the result.
MCB uses an array of synths, devices, pedals, and field recordings to conjure chilly, unsettling atmospheres on the album’s nine tracks. Grainy, textured static covers everything like a thick blanket of snow, rendering all sound spectral and alien. These tracks are closer to boreal gusts of wind than they are to “songs” in the traditional sense of the word. “Galaxy Falling” sounds like the final radio transmission from a dying planet. Faint beeps usher in several minutes of swirling, mechanized drone tones, which build to an atonal avalanche of sound that erases all else. It’s a suitably apocalyptic experience for the end of this apocalyptic year.
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