- Did you know 2020 is the hundredth anniversary of the invention of the Theremin? Well it is and despite his best efforts, Johnny Greenwood still hasn’t managed to collect every Theremin in existence. To make matters even more difficult for him, they’re actually making new ones, like the stylishly wood-panelled Moog Etherwave Pro (the Theremin was Bob Moog’s first love, apparently) and artists like Miles Brown are taking full advantage of the options provided by these technologically updated instruments.
Since I first started following his old band, The Night Terrors, the deliciously b-grade, sci-fi music that’s their stock in trade has had a minor renaissance in the closely associated genre of synth-wave. Rather than, er, ride that wave, The Night Terrors have -not broken up?- so much as slimmed down to a solo vehicle (Miles is using the band's social media for the purpose, anyway).
You could hear the trends across the band’s discography, but they’ve really crystallised on Miles’ latest record, The Gateway. As he himself says, it takes the Theremin ‘to the heart of the dancefloor’, but more than that, there’s an urgency that grips the largest part of this record and it rarely lets up. It puts me in mind of a soundtrack for an oldschool bullet-hell shooter but, unlike most soundtracks (or most shooters) The Gateway never lets me get bored.
It’s synth-heavy in the extreme, too, all other old Night Terrors affectations have been sloughed off like a spent cocoon that falls away to let this shimmering, neon moth loose. That may be part by stylistic choice but also partly a necessity. That new Theremin tech I was talking about allows Brown to control a bank of synths as he plays, adding real meat to the ethereal sound of his solo line.
It’s funny, the Theremin is a very particular sound and it’s one that Miles Brown has become much better at over the course of his career. Even so, like a whole record of bowed-saw or yodelling, it may be a musical ‘sometimes food’. As such, I’m not sure I needed a whole album featuring solo Theremin lines. As it turns out, however, I don’t think that’s a problem. Every time I was in danger of reaching peak-Theremin appreciation my attention would drift to the rest of the synth production and ...it’s great.
From the pounding thunder of a single like Shudder Speed to the (comparatively) wistful and dreamy arcs of Speaking In Tongues, The Gateway is both the essence and the perfection of Miles Brown’s idiosyncratic musical genius and I can take as much of it as his vibrating, electro-magnetic fields’, heterodyne-siren-song can bliss out.
- Chris Cobcroft.