Scattered Order: Everything Happened In The Beginning

- After over forty years in the business of making electronic-punk-noise, Scattered Order is a group still overflowing with new ideas. All that was contained in the primordial soup of their early discography has evolved with endless intricacy through ages and albums, but it all feels contemporaneously summarised on their new record, Everything Happened In The Beginning. There’s never been an interest from the band in capitalising on their long history but the theme of this record, as the title would seem to imply, is a kind of reflection on the fractal output of the group which stands both as a uniquely closed circle and as part of a more complex pattern. What’s exciting isn’t the sound or shape of the past, as much as finding a contemporary and timely way to reflect it.

In contrast to some of their more recent albums which embraced the digital-era in all it’s infinitely bloated glory, the track listing is concise. Six songs, each running at almost exactly six minutes in length, perhaps hints at some numerological significance between the three members and the two sides of a record. In any case, this vinyl constrained structure lends itself to a sense of focus and playful circularity, harking back to their early records; the egalitarian tracks lengths prod existentially at an answer to the question of just how long an idea should last.

The most immediately notable return in the Scattered Order sound is the reintroduction of Mitch Jones’ distinctive vocals which haven’t been used much since the band’s early incarnations. These are used sparingly across the record, often only uttering a line or two, but to powerful effect. And Then There Is Revision starts with an electronic thumping like the powerful, hulking machinery in a far-away, space-age factory, as Jones chronologically recites the titles of Scattered Order’s discography in a familiarly warbly, echoing drawl.

The soundscapes are deeply immersive, often dark and usually dense with different looping rhythms and interpolating drones and skrikes. The band has long since traded in their drum kits and most of their analog equipment, apart from the abundance of processed guitars, but they capture a warmth and the vivid feeling of their descendents with a new found clarity in production. Dressed In The Shadow Of A Hat is like a carnatic raga, with deep drums, celestial chanting and ecstatically indeterminate lead melodies. Each track carries a distinctive, but not too disparate mood. It creates an immersive atmosphere of stimulating and refined beats, hitting a precise balance between densely rhythmic experiment, dismantled post-punk song, and ambient bliss.

Between the artful sounds, Everything Happened In The Beginning has a sense of retrospective finality to it, like life flashing before your eyes before it all comes to an end. Confirm Humanity affirms this mood of meditation on the end of things. Through layers of rhythms, droning echoes and dramatic synth strings Jones sings mournfully “I will miss you when you depart, I will miss you when you are no longer by my side”. There’s a sense of imminent demise. It’s easy to imagine the many times the band could have ended for good, only to return again. It comes across as a definitive document of the likely final incarnation of the band, giving it a satisfying if slightly sombre sense of achievement in the Scattered Order fractal.

- Jaden Gallagher.
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