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As anyone who had ever suffered from insomnia, lucid dreams or sleepwalking will know, there is more to sleep than just the unconscious interval between awake and awake again. In fact, most people will have experienced those weird moments when the subconscious mind bleeds into perceived reality, irretrievably confusing the two, even if only for a moment. Pye Corner Audio’s Martin Jenkins has already toyed with that strange interlevel between human awareness and sleep on his previous album for Ghost Box, 2012’s Sleep Games, and Stasis builds on that album’s cavernous take on giallo-synth music, distilling the strands of mutant disco, radiophonics and horror soundtracks that dominated it (and indeed so much of the Ghost Box stable’s output) into a clear vision of enigmatic post-pop. 

While the theme of sleep is more an undercurrent than a concept on Stasis, it is heavily alluded to via two quotes from authors Arthur C Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, with Clarke’s musing on how sleeping brains display on an EEG (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) and Le Guin’s excerpt from The Lathe of Heaven noting the remoteness of the sleeper (“Right here, but out of communication”). Just as important, however, is that both are science fiction writers, and indeed the track titles, if read in order, sound like the chapter titles from an unwritten sci-fi novel about deep space travel and the inevitable induced sleep states that would require (and therefore revert back to the title). With his taste for retro-sounding synths and somber, subdued atmospheres, Jenkins crystallizes this sci-fi imagery into musical forms, with the results closer to a John Carpenter soundtrack than anything else in Ghost Box’s quintessentially British canon. If that sounds derivative, or at least incredibly familiar, well it is, because Jenkins isn’t concerned with moving forwards, but rather with delving deeper into the depths of the human psyche. 

Every track is constructed in ways that make them linger in the mind at an almost subconscious level. “Lost Ways” is a seductive, slowed down giallo disco number with a hookworm beat and whispered vocoder leitmotiv that repeats itself just out of clear earshot, like a name stuck at the tip of one’s tongue. “Autonomization” is constructed out of cyclical sequencer loops and crackling snare snaps, perhaps the furthest Jenkins treads onto Carpenter territory, especially with its swooping, eerie synth build-ups. The later “Ganzfeld Effect” is more nebulous, a sinister ambient drift laced with rain effects, distant voices and morose synth shifts. Jenkins alternates between rhythmically driven pieces and more esoteric fare, following a rollercoaster progression that could be the echo of brain patterns.

The overt reference points in horror, sci-fi and musical styles once — but no longer — long forgotten (check out the sinuous, lushly melodic sci-fi disco of “At the Heart of Stasis”) are a means for Jenkins to channel the collective consciousness and rework it into a musical idiom of his own. At no point does Stasis feel like a musical photocopy of stuff gone before, be it Carpenter, Klaus Schulze or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. After all, he’s been doing this for a while, and with Stranger Things’ success largely driven by its very similar soundtrack and a plethora of other, often less-talented artists, out there mining a similar cultural history, clearly there are legions of us out there trying to wriggle out the earworms of our dreams. Stasis is a sly, haunting and beautifully-made example of how to do so. 

Joseph Burnett