Tape Letters from the Waiting Room

“More enjoyable to my macabre ears is Tape Letters From The Waiting Room (PSYCHÉ TROPES TROPES007). Even before you play it, you can tell from that title alone, and the eerie cover image, that we’re pretty much getting a semi-occult transmission here, messages from the beyond, delivered by séance and psychic forces. Vernon’s music here was composed as the soundtrack to a film created by Steven McInnery, a cinematic work which received several citations at experimental film festivals in 2020 and 2021, and was apparently made entirely by splicing together segments of found 16mm footage. McInnery intended to author an “existential drama” and explicitly wanted to explore themes of “death and rebirth” with his edits. I never saw the movie, but it’s evident that Vernon’s sounds here are in total sympathy with the project, taking the listener directly into a strange, spooked-out paranormal world from the instant the stylus hits the grooves. Disembodied voices, ambiguous fragmented stories from abandoned tapes (see Time Deferred, above), backwards tapes and chilling atmospheric moments, all amounting to a suitably unsettling sojourn in this strange world that lies beyond the Veil of Tears. Even Vernon’s track titles are evocative and poetic, for instance ‘A Photograph of a Photograph’ alluding to the mysteries that can be induced by the mechanics of refilming (and indeed reprocessing magnetic tapes, a process that he knows so well); or ‘Beforetime Guests’, a very lyrical way of alluding to the dead visitors arriving at the séance in the form of floating ghastly heads or ectoplasmic manifestations.

In my mind I can’t help connecting this LP to certain records by the Italian artiste Simon Balestrazzi, who has likewise revealed a penchant for the supernatural and the occult in his work, using the tape machine and processed drones as his private portal to visit the “other side”; one excellent example (and a favourite of mine) is the Candor Chasma collaboration, a very evocative set in which it appeared to be possible to travel time to visit certain famous mystics and visionaries of the past. However, Mark Vernon might not exhibit the exact same relish for the supernatural; although this LP is thrillingly weird, what comes over in the final analysis is a sense of longing, regret, nostalgia for the past, and sympathy for our dead relatives and forebears, some of whom appear wreathed in misery and trapped in an endless loop of reliving their past sins. Vernon has consistently exhibited this compassion and warmth, this connection to humanity, throughout all of his unique work, and this is further evidence of it. Vinyl release; issued with a section of 16mm film in the sleeve. Scry your own copy with a magnifying glass to reveal your own personal ghosts lurking in the frames.”

Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector, June 2023