Phalangius - The Cambridge Library Murders

From the village of Wilberton near the famous university town of Cambridge comes Phalangius aka Spencer Earl Spidley. Played entirely with a single Roland Juno 6 synthesizer and recorded on dusty cassette tapes the Cambridge Library Murders is a typical excentric English synthesizer album which covers topics such as Infocom text adventures on Sinclair Spectrums, the British aircraft industry and the Falckland war, mathematic theorems and just a bunch of other stuff that fits with that somehow. Sounds like fun!
Musicwise its somewhere in between Smackos and Klaus Weltman but with a more rougher edge and a very coherent tonal colour, probably due to the fact that everything is made with the Juno 6 synthesizer.
The 18 tracks make a nice combination altogether, Sometimes droney ambient with typical soundtrack stabs and even some uplifting happy tracks (like Theme from Andrew Wiles)
Storywise the tracktitles and listing don't seem to be very coherent (unlike in many other Strange Life albums)....with some puzzling and sluething, just like in a British detective series, you might be able to glue the tracks together in a narrative that makes sense. For example, with a track like Falckland Flashback: Assault on Goose Green we can guess that the murderer in the Cambridge Library is a Falckland veteran and with Infocom Nights that there might be someone (the killer, just like in Computer Day? or just some other guy) likes to play Infocom text adventures on Sinclair Spectrum computers. But where Andrew Wiles, a mathematician who solved Fermats last theorem in the 90s, comes in is not entirely clear...we can only guess what is going on in the mind of Spencer Earl Spidley but it all sounds very intriguing. Overflowing with tape saturation The Cambridge Library Murders is like a passing rainshower dimming the lights of day, and that can be a beautifull experience for the romantics among us.

You can listen to MP3 previews from the Strange Life website:

Phalangius - Snowman Theorem MP3 A very desolate impressionist piece and most probably the best track on the album, starting out with growling low bass notes that quickly dissolve into a hypnotic repetetive sequence that sounds very similar to Erik Satie's gnossiennes...but in a bath of warm reverb with wow and flutter foamy soap. The track Cold Front Approaching is in a similar vein sounding like the first call of winter is approaching over the fields outside Cambridge.

Phalangius - Percival Pembroke C1 MP3 The percival Pembroke was a Brittish twin propellor plane from the 1950s and not a pigeon as the name would subliminal suggest. The track is nothing more then a happy yet moody bassline with some pitch bend analog swirls layered over, but it does the job creating a modest and typical english feeling hommage to the Pembroke C1.


Phalangius - Solomon
We don´t know who or what Solomon is but it sounds like a typical John Carpenter and Unit Blackflight composition. The track begins with a creeping light bassline that is slowly countered by longer heavyweight bass notes and it is not long before for the usual epic string parts come in, ending in an almost overdriven distorted climax.

Phalangius - Infocom Nights
In a time when computers where surrounded with an aura of technological marvel a text adventure was something special that people would play all night. Lost in a fictious world, terror lurked around every keystroke in games like Deadline, The Lurking Horror and Zork. In this very dark track we can imagine somebody lost in such a game on the library computer in the middle of the night with the Cambridge libary murderer just steps away...

Phalangius - Gloster Meteor MP3
A bit of the oddball track on this album, sounding a bit like a tearjearking epic Commodore 64 game soundtrack that could easily have been composed by sir Rob Hubbard or Martin Galway, it shows the sonic powers of the Juno 6 synthesizer. The epic atmosphere fits the title perfectly as the Gloster Meteor was Britians first jet fighter and when we close our eyes we can see them soaring majesticly through the skies.