pure sound - submarine

pure sound submarine home press

After a 16-year break, Pure Sound: Submarine is Vince Hunt's first venture back into the world of noise-pop. Featuring former Inca Babies guitarists Harry Stafford and Rob Hayward, Submarine is built on a series of guitar and bass performances, blended with archive speech clips, atmosphere and incidental sound.

It's a 27-minute introduction to the ongoing Pure Sound project, which has its roots in Hunt's audio gathering for the collage track "4.49 Stool", a collaboration with singer Keith Curtis, which was included on the 1986 A Witness album I Am John's Pancreas. Inspired by Nash's skies, Brancusi's Kiss, the harsh terrain of Spitsbergen and long evenings under the Midnight Sun, Pure Sound take a very different slant on music, using repetition, tape manipulation and dramatic intervals to create a unique sound. Submarine is an album based on pauses and rests, mechanical intervals and word patterns.

Rob Hayward plays endless variations as tracks swell and develop, dispersing and re-gathering with each chop of actuality, pinned down by the relentless bass of Hunt on this his first new release since A Witness' final single "I Love You Mr Disposable Razors" in 1989. This is an album rich in texture and contrast, filled with the sounds of steelworks, industrial museums and diesel engines. There are recordings of survivors of the Lusitania (1915), of radio engineers in the World War Two desert campaign and in the skies above Germany on bombing raids.

There are the songs of Cockney fishmongers selling haddock and of coastguards warning of gale force winds, all given a classic Hunt twist and turned into a musical form, blended with hypnotic rhythms and lush audio soundscapes. Submarine is the first step in Pure Sound's journey through nightshifts, heartbreak and fatigue, a startling soundtrack of musical experiments which will soon be released on Euphonium Records.