The Uranus Music Prize // An Alternative Shortlist

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So, we’ve had over 24 hours to agree or insult this year’s Mercury Music Prize. So what myself (Rich Hughes ), Scott McMillan and Matt Poacher decided to do was devise a real “alternative” shortlist; The Uranus Music Prize (sorry). This isn’t about producing a list of difficult or obscure music, this is a chance to champion and bring to the fore some artists that maybe can’t afford the £300 entry and 50 CD’s needed to be “eligible” for the Mercury’s, or sit outside the usual outlets. I think the past 12-18 months has seen a real growth in quality of British and Irish music in the alternative, and left-field genres. Look beyond the NME and (most of) the printed press. That’s not to say they don’t champion some of this music, as a couple of entries on this list show, but we’ve gone outside this. This is our 12 strong shortlist – we’ll reveal the winner in September…

Polar Bear, Peepers (Leaf): Ahh, yes, the token Jazz record? Not with Peepers. A perfect blend of Jazz and Rock aesthetics, with an added twist of clever technology, that breathed new life into Seb Rochford’s band. Post-jazz might be a good way to describe it, there’s a playfulness and humour at work here that some people might find confusing. But the wonderful tempo, the sax solo’s and Rochford’s impeccable drumming ensure that as the sounds leave your ears, they’re forever left reverberating around your brain. Once again, another band to catch life to fully appreciate the careful patchwork nature of the music and the sheer skill at work here.

Leyland Kirby, Sadly, The Future is No Longer What it Was (HAFTW): This is the archetypal grand folly – a near four hour suite of ambient/drone music that is a summation of everything Kirby has worked at to date and an epic statement that functions as a document of loss. In past incarnations, Kirby – as The Caretaker, amongst others – has explored our relationship to memory and nostalgia, his collected works a kind of vast haunted ballroom of half-remembered pasts. Here, Kirby works at the very fabric of spectrality, and trapped in an eternal flattened present mourns a future that never arrives. It references Eno, kosmiche, William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, but more than it seems to tap into a well of collective walled-in dread. We used to have shamans to do this work for us… MP

David Sylvian, Manafon (Samadhisound): With Manafon, David Sylvian showed the kids what risk-taking was all about, continuing his repudiation of his popular past in favour of something much more challenging, and far less obviously commercial. Collecting around him a group of A-list improvisers from the jazz and electronic music fields (from Evan Parker to Christian Fennesz), he bent their structures round his still-glorious voice to create something quite unique. SM

These New Puritans, Hidden (Angular): Hidden deserves to be nominated for it’s sheer ambition. If there was one record that tapped into the very concious of Britain in the 21st Century, it was this. Dense, dark and full of morose brass, it felt like These New Puritans had made a connection with the insular, confused and aggressive urban landscape that surrounds us. From the Anglican choirs of ‘Orion’ to the gentle woodwind of ‘Canticle’, through the binary ‘Where Corals Lie’ everything was driven by TNP’s rhythmic prowess, a driving energy that held the record together completely. RH

Richard Skelton, Landings (Type): Landings, an album and book release, is the culmination of a three year relationship Richard Skelton shared with the landscape of Anglezarke in the West Pennine moors. In a way it is the recording of a disappearance – of a person enveloped in grief, seeking to dissolve the boundaries between inside and outside, to escape by becoming part of the tides of the land. As part of this process Skelton used the landscape as both a kind of vast studio and an instrument, using the elements as a backdrop for the minutely pieced together nature of his compositions – which, like his spare writing style built from historical readings and impressionistic encounters with the land, are compositions built from very little: accordion drones, bowed strings, the hush of water on stone. Indeed sometimes Skelton’s method seems so inscrutable, yet so powerful and emotionally affecting that you wonder if you’re listening to a form of alchemy. Which in the end, it might just be. MP

Pausal, Lapses (Barge): So quiet and unassuming does Lapses appear on first listen that you can’t imagine Hampshire’s Simon Bainton and Alex Smalley ever nominating themselves for the Mercury. Shame. With this, their second album, the duo have continued their compelling journey into post-Eno ambience, floating the listener out to a sea of gently ebbing guitar, piano and violin. As with the best music of this kind, the detail lies in the depths, not necessarily on the surface. Dive down. SM

Broadcast and The Focus Group present Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (Warp): While Ghost Box’s Julian House had previously designed Broadcast’s record sleeves, this was the first musical collaboration between him and the country’s finest retro-futurist electronic outfit. The result was the finest thing either have been involved with, a somewhat unsettling blend of Hammer Horror atmospherics and warped pop music, an occult dream from childhood leaking back into the present. SM

Trembling Bells, Abandoned Love (Honest Jons): Abandoned Love is Trembling Bells’ second album, following on from last years Carbeth. They make music that is firmly in the folk rock tradition, but there is an unhinged element to them, something other. It may be partly to do with their collective backgrounds – drummer Alex Nielsen is a free jazz and free folk luminary, Lavinia Blackwall, a classically trained soprano, has a background in medieval music forms – or it may be simply that they have some privileged access to that over-dream of the Old Wyrd Britain… Whatever the reason, they make a glorious, rollicking clatter and effortlessly revive old folk forms and memories and Abandoned Love is a fine addition to Britain’s visionary music. MP

Fuck Buttons, Tarot Sport (ATP): The pitch and yaw of Fuck Button’s trip of musical discovery is one to be embraced rather than shied away from. Building on the epic beats and grooves of debut Street Horrrsing, Tarot Sport took plenty of cues from producer Andrew Weatherall: this is dance music for the discerning listener. There’s only two ways to fully appreciate this noise though, either witness it live or play it fucking loud. There is a way beyond their carefully created wall of noise – it’s a small door, but once opened, there lies a bounty of riches behind. RH

Autechre, Oversteps (Warp): After Quaristice smashed their sound into short sharp shards, Autechre recombined them into thrilling new forms on Oversteps. Look beyond the trademark whip-cracking beats and you find a far more textural and – whisper it – melodic affair than mid-period Autechre, drawing from more adventurous 80s pop (Japan, Sakamoto) as much as it did contemporary electronic music. After all these years they are still always on the move, not standing still for a second. SM

Scuba, Triangulation (Hotflush): A list of best records of the past 12 months not featuring any dubstep/post-dubstep? Seems daft in 2010 as this is one area where the UK seems to be finding rich pools of talent. And Scuba is no exception. The impeccably produced Triangulation is a cross-fertilisation of influences from the past 20 years. The dance-floor drums, the crackle of vinyl, the sound of urban decay. The Scuba moniker for Paul Rose seems apt – the overall feeling of this album is one of flowing, underwater tides of music. Ever since Joe Muggs recommended this to me, I’ve listened to little else. RH

Demdike Stare, Forest of Evil (Modern Love): Demdike Stare are named after a witch tried in the infamous Pendle witch trials of 1612. Their sound is something like a noir take on minimalistic dub techno, painting vast soundscapes from relatively simple means. But given their attachment to their locality, there is something more than simple beat science at work – Forest of Evil is both a studio exercise in piecing together samples and atmospheres but also a work of psychic dredging. An incantation. It summons the likes of Basic Channel and Shackleton, but it also summons Hammer, The Wickerman and the films of Michael Reeves; and via their artwork they also manage to summon Crowley and Tales of the Unexpected. Put these disparate yet thematically entwined strands together and you have Forest of Evil – a knowing, smart and unsettlingly brilliant piece of work. MP