Review: Concretism - Town Planning

This article was commissioned by erdjohann .

2.2 million tons of concrete leave an impact.

In 1973, the Greater London Council began construction of Ringways 3 and 4, the two highways that would eventually merge to form the modern day M25. In some ways, the Ringways project was historically definitive; it was, after all, one of the first major highway projects of its kind to take into consideration where it was proposed to be built, instead of simply bulldozing through whatever was there, whether that be a tranquil countryside or a preoccupied urban area. Still, though, 2.2 million tons of concrete leaves a mark on the rolling hills of Southern England; for all its efforts to be a low-impact project, the M25 is a monolith to construction, a deeply brutalist work reminiscent of the architecture the country gravitated towards in its post-World War II reconstruction.

Somewhere on the eastern curve of the M25, the highway bulldozes through an urban sprawl on the outskirts of the Essexian town of Grays, home of electronic musician Chris Sharp. While his primary musical project, Concretism, is not directly named for the policy of British mass brutalist construction - the term instead derives from a school of modernist abstract art - the parallels are obvious and, I think, intentional. Weaving threads of hauntology and 1970s synthesizer music into bleak, formalist soundscapes, the project is self described as “music of a grim, Cold War Britain.” Town Planning , the fifth EP under the Concretism name, departs from some of the other material from the project by mostly eschewing the more direct hauntological aspects of Sharp’s work - there is almost none of Magnox 's sampling, nor Another Way of Looking at It 's harsh extra-crunchy texturing (though it does occasionally indulge in respectable tape lo-fi) - in favour of an almost pure exploration of early synth music stylistics.

The building blocks that Town Planning works with are immediately obvious to anyone with a basic working knowledge of electronic music's earlier years; the stark grooves and melodic core harken back to the “technopop” era of synthpop, particularly Kraftwerk's minimalist approach, though you would be hard-pressed to call any of Town Planning 's tracks pop music. The sweeping synth tones and reverb and delay-drenched processing signal an equally strong root in progressive electronic, though the minimalist arrangements and gentle, thrumming grooves lean more Komische Musik than the sweeping, progressive tendencies that artists outside of Germany often pursued. At times, the record’s modern stature is betrayed; “The Cursed Streets” and “Tesseract” both land in a very 1990s space with their morphing IDMesque percussion. For the most part, though, Town Planning is an impressively faithful effort, with most of its tracks sounding as if they could have been plucked off some obscure late 70s or 80s tape found in the depths of a record store bargain bin or secondhand store collection.

Town Planning is at its strongest when leaning into its most ethereal and weightless modalities. “Prototype Housing Estate” is almost Plantasia -esque, with a shimmering space age feel and one of the record’s daintiest melodies; the record’s untitled hidden track is even more transparently emotive, and might actually stand as the EP's single best composition. This isn’t to say that Town Planning does not succeed in its colder, more urban cuts. “Eiswagen” collages through a variety of synth hooks over an intoxicating groove and itself stands as a highlight. All of these tracks succeed by leaning into sides of early electronic music that feel lost in a lot of modern synth music revival, expressing a playful energy and frantic creativity that almost dances at the edge of the atmosphere Concretism tries to express as a project.

The EP's travels into territory more deeply mined for inspiration by modern synthwave and electronica musicians are less exciting, though still fairly compelling; “The Age Of The Train” really does sound like a midpoint between Magic Sword and true-blue late 70s progtronic, lifted highest when its floaty melody slices through the trudging groove. “The Hospital” is similarly slow-paced and has a good sense of texture, cutting its sweeping chordwork with reverbed-out percussive hits and a hopeful melodic core. It’s not really fair to blame Town Planning for the fact that the styles it faithfully recreates have become the basis for such an oversaturated and all-too-frequently hollow style, and I don’t think it's correct to say that the record lacks substance, but these tracks do hit relatively less hard than the ones that sit on less trodden ground.

It may appear that the two sides of this record would make it incohesive, but both contradicting moods are necessary; the darker ones seem more obviously reflective of the cold formalism of the era of Britain that the project represents, but that formalism only exists because of the intoxicating excitement about a vague future, endlessly pushed without a clear destination; progress at any cost. You simply cannot reflect the full feeling of the period of Britain that Concretism is trying to recreate without both these components. In the early 1900s, Britain hummed with visions of a fantastic society where anyone could travel anywhere in minutes. In the late 1900s, Britain brought that vision to life by deforming its landscape with millions of tons of concrete. Town Planning 's greatest triumph is that it so effectively captures the calculated entropy and cold cynicism of an era where forward movement was both inevitable and less magical by the second.

Town Planning is available on Bandcamp . Concretism can also be found on Soundcloud , Bluesky , and YouTube .