Hawksmoor: Oneironautics (CD)

Hawksmoor’s new album Oneironautics on Soul Jazz Records follows on from last year’s critically acclaimed Telepathic Heights, as well as a re-release of his album Saturnalia on the Library of the Occult label earlier this year. James McKeown, aka Hawksmoor, continues his fascination with the sounds and sensibilities of 1970s/80s German electronic groups - think early Cluster, Harmonia, CAN, NEU!, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Michael Rother.

On new album Oneironautics, James McKeown successfully combines these pulsating ripples of Germanic electronica with a number of decidedly English references: the soaring, hypnotic and pastoral qualities of Brian Eno, circa Another Green World; the long, sustained lines of Robert Fripp’s Frippertonics; and the poetic feel of early Durutti Column. McKeown combines all of these elements while also remaining with one foot firmly in the British melodic hauntological modular synth aesthetic of hauntology - Ghost Box, Mount Vernon Arts Lab, Focus Group et al.

Once again using strictly modular synths, electronic drum rhythms, and guitars, Hawksmoor has created an electronic landscaped music world that is both new and old, immediately identifiable and yet utterly unique.

1. Parallelograms
   
2. The Transcendentalist
   
3. Glass Teeth
   
4. Galadali
   
5. Traumzeit
   
6. Salpêtrière
   
7. Nereides
   
8. A Forest In The Sky
   
9. Yourcelium
   
10. The Oneironaut