Sonic geographer Francis Heery’s latest album is a dark and moody aural survey of a Galway city suburb.
Or is it?
Released under his stage name The Cube of Unknowing by label Fort Evil Fruit, Heery’s latest offering ‘Ghost Circuits Menlo’ links the rurality of the Menlo Gaeltacht, with the technobabble of Menlo, California.
Inspired by the world building of sci-fi wizard Samuel R Delany, and photographs of the Galway suburbs by Maeve O’ Neill, Ghost Circuits Menlo guides the listener through a series of fever-dream sound scenarios featuring squelchy modular synth activity, speculative bio-acoustics and restless drones.
The album is a sonic psycho-geography of a mythical Menlo? The original townland in Galway? Or its namesake in California, founded by two Galway emigrants and birthplace of Silicon Vallley? Or is it the New Jersey site of Thomas Edison’s research lab? Maybe a spacetime superposition of all three…?
Ghost Circuits Menlo evokes an atmosphere of post-human melancholy, situated somewhere between sound sculpture, contemporary electronic composition and paranoid ambient. The album is available on cassette or digital on Fort Evil Fruit’s bandcamp website.
