Colin Potter 'The Abominable Slowman' LP
02.12.17
This new release on the Spanish Abstrakce label is now available. All copies bought from ICR will be signed by Colin Potter & will come with a free Bandcamp download code.
From the label : "The Abominable Slowman", is the logical follow-on from his previous 2015 LP “Rank Sonata”. Like that album, there are elements that were recorded many years ago, but this work also contains new music. Again, the emphasis is on rhythm, although the rhythmic components range from conventional drum sounds to strange electronic and/or mutated outbursts, often accompanied by squalling guitars. As to what this sounds like, keywords would be soundtrack, experimental, ambient, electronic psychedelia, contemporary, drone.... There's constant experimentation throughout the album, a search for never-before heard sounds to create obscure atmospheres and a pleasantly disturbing feeling of disquietude.
The LP is housed in a beautiful grey cardboard sleeve, hand-printed by letterpress, and die cut to reveal the printed inner sleeve, which features a number of pictures of The Abominable Slowman during the recording of the album at IC Studio’s current London location. Comes with a high quality protective poly oversleeve.
“This abomination was recorded at various locations of IC Studio. There are elements here that were begun over 20 years ago but I could never figure out what to do with them. Eventually I worked it out. Time moves slowly.”
Colin Potter, London 2017
David Keenan, interview with Colin Potter, Red Bull Music Academy Daily
'Colin Potter has been a central figure in the UK’s DIY and post - industrial underground since the late ‘70s. His ICR label, founded in 1981, blurred the lines between post - punk experimentation, crude pop, Krautrock - inspired drone work and contemporary electronica, with releases by everyone from DIY legends The Instant Automatons through Chris & Cosey of Throbbing Gristle , experimental composer Trevor Wishart, drone soundists Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate and Bryn Jones’s Muslimgauze. He has also been a key collaborator with both Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, working in the studio with both groups since the late ‘90s as well as serving as a member of Nurse With Wound’s current live line - up. From the late ‘90s to the late ‘00s Potter’s IC Studio, based in a Victorian Water Tower outside Preston, was a lightning rod for musicians working beneath the radar and a focal point for the nascent UK drone scene. Recent years have seen an upsurge in interest in Potter’s solo works.”
daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2015/03/colin-potter-interview
Review from Norman Records :
The latest in a slew of reissues and declarations of adoration for noiser of note Colin Potter is actually seasonal: it’s called ‘The Abominable Slowman’, for goodness sake, and sees him work his dense, dank electronics into often humorous motorik conventions. Recorded over an appropriately glacial period of time over twenty years ago, this record literally sounds like it’s been stewing in some stagnant corner, Potter taking turns on blemished and obscured dance ruminations and droney slabs of sound, such as the deep sinking “The Knights are Drawing In”. The resonating percussion and shifting soundbytes makes for maybe my favourite Potter track ever, a totally enrapturing sonic void that makes me never want to come back up to the surface.
Flip it and the guitars fuzz things into action: “Unstable Tennis” is a great, straight-laced noise dance track that grooves right at the centre, as if Potter traveled to the future, borrowed the aesthetic palette of Shit & Shine and made it play properly. As always, it’s wonderful hearing Potter tether his self-sabotaging tendencies to tunes so hit-making.
Review by Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly - 'By now it is very well likely that you saw a concert by Nurse With Wound at one of those bigger festivals for ‘new’ music. You probably noticed that the central place, the nerve system, the core of the group is not founder Steven Stapleton but Colin Potter, who brings all the sounds produced by others together in a fine mix. Potter knows his way around sound effects very well, and in his solo music that shows as well. I was playing this oddly titled record, (with odd pictures on the insert of a man in a hairy suit in the studio, presumably mister Potter himself) and I was thinking ‘is there a specific sound/genre that captures the world of Potter in a way?’ I realized that I couldn’t think of one, but perhaps it is because the five pieces on this record weren’t what I was expecting from what I heard from Potter in recent years. As Potter explains on the insert, some of these sounds are rather old, and somehow never found a place in his work. In recent years the solo works of Potter were dark, mostly ambient and highly atmospheric, yet not always from the most quietest sides of things. The earliest works I heard from Potter, back in the day on cassette (many of which were re-issued later on) also saw him playing drum
machines and guitars. ‘The Abominable Slowman’ returns to that sound as in these pieces guitars play an important, and so do drum machines. It makes for quite a change. Potter plays some quite forceful tunes on this record in which the guitar howls around like in them good old hippie days (see also Kosmose, but with Potter’s twenty-first century wizardry more violent), while the machines hammer time away. Only ‘The Knights Are Drawing In’ is a bit more subdued piece of music, but also not entirely free of looped sounds; just like the more orchestral ‘Unstable Tennis’. Potter opens up the whole box of tricks in the studio to re-animate those early 80s and enlarge them into something new and he does he great and rather surprising job, opening up a new road in his otherwise already wide palette of sounds
and has his tools working for him in a great way. An excellent reviving of his oldest sounds in a new bright, shining context.'
Review from Boomkat :
A strong new addition to Colin Potter’s voluminous catalogue, ‘The Abominable Slowman’ features a mix of new and archival 20 year old recordings polished for purpose.
Arriving as the solo follow-up to ‘Rank Sonata’ [Hallow Ground, 2015], and dished up just prior to his part in last year’s ace Potter Natalizia Zen trio side for Ecstatic, 2017’s ‘The Abominable Slowman’ sees Potter time-travel between various IC Studio locations, tying up loose ends and manipulating perceptions of temporality in his lauded style of psychedelic magick.
In five parts he explores components of rhythm as a tool for bending perceptions of time. His motorik meters dwell in a paradoxical state of driving forward motion and repetitive stasis, first erupting from dense, buzzsaw noise into swampy, lysergic and acidic psych grind in ‘Not Yeti’, then slowing the tape down to a crawl and opening out, emphasising strange artefacts therein with ‘The Knights Are Drawing In’. ‘Unstable Tennis’ follows with a gnashing flux of percussion and distorted whirligig leads in a viscous whorl, and the contrast of sludgy trample and piquant electronics in ‘Never Underestimate The Power of Nothing’ brilliantly pull mind and body in opposing directions.
Review from The Sunday Experience : Staying with Abstrakce, here’s Colin Potter with ‘never underestimate the power of nothing’ from a recent sent called ‘the abominable slowman’, maybe its just me but we find this playfully sinister, its clockworking menace some kind of portent of ne’er do well deeds afoot, its cloaking chill chimed macabre lengthening its shadow extinguishing the light and escape route as it tightens with impish dread. Alternatively be it a spot of motorik kosmische pilfered from the dark side of Bureau B’s Esmark or Der Plan with a side serving of Radiophonic Workshop-pery attaching.
