36 - Circuit Bloom

A Closer Listen

36 returns to the tape format after seven long years.

Circuit Bloom‘s piano-based tape loops summon feelings of emptiness, loneliness and escape, of someone struggling and trying to accept their true self.

It looks at the world through an outsider’s eyes.

Someone cut off from all things, someone who doesn’t quite fit in.

As dark, rainy synths leak from the sky, they both desperately search for someone else to hold.

The lonely soul puts the music on and the ambient atmosphere begins to sink in, kissing the lips in a long sustain with its tender, subtle shifts and melancholic hues, less a kiss of passion and more a kiss designed to comfort, to say, I am here.

 Two spirits connected.

The ambient music lives on the outskirts of the popular town.

Its cell phone never rings.

The evening meal equals a dinner for one.

Sleep is restless.

The synth seems destined to be alone. Although crying is a catharsis, it unwillingly sheds tears every night, the rain running down the valleys of its face, emanating from the hurt windows of its eyes and the cause of its blurry vision. Such is the melancholic power of the music, evident in the piano since time immemorial.

Even the interference of the radio, of other voices and other beating hearts, doesn’t offer to console. Hope is always possible, though, and the music’s meditations are desperate for a lone ray of its brilliance.

If the music’s lost, it’s natural for it to want to find its way home, wherever home is.

Young hearts continue to run free, and Circuit Bloom is another sublime record in 36’s impressive discography. It’s at once entirely what you’d expect, and completely different.

Beautiful, introverted music for beautiful, introverted people.

‘Music is the only true love That which draws us across the boundaries that kept us apart so long Realising that they were only lines, We kept our gaze upwards And looked into our eyes Seeing only ourselves.

We flourished in the twilight Made peace under the sun Left our pasts in the deserts Crawled through caves Rested by streams And left scattered our dreams among uneven paths’. (James Catchpole)

Available here