 
Thin Bony Scour
2003
CD
53:39 Stewart Gott
16 December 2003 noise experimental | A remarkable disc from a remarkable location, recorded at a field station in the Scottish wilderness, surrounded by a forest of trees, that in the aerial picture sent to me by the artists, look like great clumps of broccoli about to choke the little research base set down in their midst. The music of Straiph, if music it is, consists of noise, ambient tinkering and some disconcerting voice samples. The isolation of their existence has clearly had an effect. There is more than a tinge of paranoia here, a hint of claustrophobia. Cabin fever. I had a stack of stuff about the disc, all of which I have lost, so I can do little more than recommend it to you as a well thought out and well executed excursion into the dark corners of the mind, which put me most in mind of the zombie films of George Romero. That same mix of edgy incidental music, disembodied voices and ominous mechanical swirl. Straiph are proud of being Scottish, which gives me the opportunity to have a vaguely related little rant about my own first name, a family name. The original Stewart – as in House of Stewart - was Walter the Steward (i.e. Stewart) who looked after Scotland while Robert the Bruce was away harrying the English. So if that doesn’t make “Stewart” more authentic than the later, French, variation of “Stuart” then I don’t know what does. And sitting here writing this rubbish I was suddenly jolted by the thirteenth track on the disc, ‘Bring-Bing’, a howling slab of noise which reminded me, vividly, of the Piltdown Man passage in the second part of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”. Hoots.
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