The material that You Are Not Alone collects is as ephemeral and piecemeal as Teignmouth Electron’s discography itself. The solo project of Brighton sound artist Maureen Hallomas (also a past or present member of Polly Shang Kuan Band, Rubber Demon, Leopard Leg, Men Oh Pause, etc.) most commonly manifests as a “live performance guise,” to use the liner notes’ phrase, and only a small handful of tapes and CD-Rs have been sporadically released over the past two-or-so decades. As it happens, “ephemeral” and “piecemeal” are descriptors that also apply to Hallomas’s music. “From Beyond the Attic,” a work exhumed from 2001, deals in the most banal of paranormal activities; “possessed” portable tape player is used as a makeshift sonic lightning rod that catches spectral snatches and fraught flashes, conjuring a murky, broken soundscape plagued with paranoia. The voices of the beyond that are drawn into its orbit are both earthly and otherworldly: mundane phone-line eavesdrops engage in hypnagogic conversation with less easily explained ghost-transmissions. (The spoken elements throughout the CD, both the incidental and the intentional, remind me a bit of the haunting, off-kilter audio dramas of Miranda July, albeit much less scripted—and therefore much more mercurial.) “Science TAC” originates even further back, its dream-logic clippings chopped from “surreal skits and zero competence musical performance” that Hallomas recorded with a friend in ’99. For all its on-purpose obscurity, though, the actual conversations aren’t drastically different from the ones captured in “Attic” in terms of pure rhythm and mundanity of content. Just one of the many ways You Are Not Alone delights in blurring boundaries, whether between sense and nonsense, said and heard, life and death.
Noise Not Music 