MYTHOLOGY : Zone 01 : Earliest Mild Peril material remastered
‘Mythology’ is a project, begun in 2025, that revisits 15 years of mythic synthesiser music. With the benefit of hindsight and a clearer sense of intent, I am not only remastering all significant work, but also structuring this personal mythology into a number of phases, or 'zones'. While there could be some adjustments to the music along the way, ultimately the project will result in more available material across the various iterations of Mild Peril.
ZONE 01, unsurprisingly, covers my earliest work - just three tracks:
Film Four
Explorer
Pure Reality
The files for these were lost for a long time but with no small amount of effort I was able to recover some elements and successfully recreate others. In my opinion these now sound better than they ever did.
You can hear on 'Film Four' and 'Explorer' that at the time of writing I was still heavily involved in London's weird wave scene, as documented some time later on Soft Riot's 'And You Will Find Them In The Basement' compilation.
'Film Four' was a reference to several instrumentals by vintage synth artists that I was fond of - 'Film One' by John Foxx, 'Film 2' by Grauzone, Absolute Body Control also had a 'Film 1' and 'Film 4'. I was also very much enamoured by the 1982 record 'Explorer' by Tony Carey, hence the title of track two.
After ‘Pure Reality’, it would be another two or three years before I returned to writing solo music, but this third piece points generally in the direction I would continue with 'Unknown Zones'. 'Navigator' from that album was intentionally another attempt at something like this one.
I remember the odd feeling of having a completely clean slate, and also wanting to do something unlike any of my local contemporaries. I was feeling my way towards this idea of some kind of 'pure' or 'traditional' synthesizer music, in the sense of melodic rather than experimental styles. Looking for a constant thread that stretched back to the point at which keyboards were first attached to oscillators, rather than it being a case of trite nostalgia. Although nostalgia, if used carefully, can be a kind of guiding light, in the sense of allowing an earlier version of yourself to inform where you go, rather than the ideas of genre and other structures that you pick up later in life.
'Pure Reality' was one of a couple of vocal phrases I originally cropped from a demo I was working on with a friend at the time of writing this. An earlier version of the piece has those vocals intact.
Download from Bandcamp here:
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Available on streaming soon…