Machine Youth

The cornerstone of the release, Lead-in/out, is born from a long-held fascination with sound reproduction, and the flawed beauty of vinyl. Whates repurposes a turntable test record, transforming its utilitarian sounds—needle drops, static, lead-in and lead-out grooves, and calibration tones—into the raw material for his composition. By manipulating platter speeds and sampling techniques, he forms these artefacts into a delicate mass of skewed beats and eerie melodies. The resulting soundscape is hauntingly nostalgic, its ramping tones and distorted rhythms evoking a sense of time warping and memories resurfacing.

Machine Youth, the title track and perhaps more approachable of the pairing, serves as a mnemonic exercise in sonic reconstruction. Sampling from its companion piece in a meta-referential twist, it rebuilds the auditory palette of the late 80s and early 90s through intuition. No mere pastiche, Whates playfully probes and subverts the style, channelling the felt experience of his adolescence—suburban Manchester, grainy soundtracks to TV movies, car headlights reflected on bedroom ceilings, the primitive bleeps of Amiga games, the tangible optimism of a pre-internet childhood.

Both tracks embody the transitional experiences of a micro-generation born in the early 1980s, straddling the analogue world of their childhood and the digital revolution of their teens. Whates captures the essence of this shift, expressing a bittersweet longing for a more tactile, seemingly simpler era while acknowledging the seismic cultural changes brought by emerging technologies.

Machine Youth is more than a sonic time capsule; it's a personal reflection on memory, progress, and the passage of time. The imperfections and glitches in the music mirror the fallibility of recollection, while the underlying structures trace the evolution from analogue to digital consciousness.