TTW#119 – Middex – Scrutiny
Cassette only – limited edition of 100 copies
Buy on Bandcamp
A1: Visitor Fed
A2: Rook Takes Town
A3: Scrutiny
A4: Taker
B1: Visitor Fed (Oblex Version)
B2: Rook Takes Town (Oblex Version)
B3: Scrutiny (Oblex Version)
B4: Taker (Oblex Version)
Recorded with Lindsay Corstorphine at Devil’s Mango III. Oblex versions mixed by Oblate and Middex. Illustration: Simon Scott.
Middex came out of the city-edge where aircraft fly low, where runways and canals are false exits and disappeared in to the dense city and with crude electronics and blunt voice attempts a communication beneath tarmac, above rooftop and with side-eye slowly surveying left and right.
Middex performs very occasionally and has released on Polytechnic Youth and Makina Books.
Reviews
Boomkat (UK):
Liminal, hypnagogic cold wave from the edgelands of London, marking up a strong new addition to The Tapeworm
For their 2nd long format trip as Middex, following tapes and 7”s for Polytechnic Youth and Makina Books, the drolly enigmatic protagonist conveys a sense of life spent under low flying planes, “where runways and canals are false exits” in a four-square set of barely-there songs which also come radically reframed by Oblex, aka the chimeric hybrid of Lindsay Corstorphine’s Oblate and Middex.
The original are drily puckered observations on the mundanity of suburban sprawl and about the periphery’s relationship to the centre, with Middex’s vox placed elusively in-the-mix against endless 2-storey drones and electronic metaphors for the meridian phosphorescence of the city at night.
On the B-side the Oblex versions short circuit the connection between edge and core, smudging out the vocals and a sense of self, dematerialise the songs in a more cryptic series of transmissions recalling the stubbed and nubby sound of Thought Broadcast or The Stomach on L.I.E.S. This is exactly the kind of weirdness tapes are ideal for.
Bleep (UK):
Straight from the metropole’s edge lands — a place of boy racers with glowing undercarriages and poorly funded train station platforms — comes the interstitial sound of Middex, via the wonderful Tapeworm imprint. Who better to offer Scrutiny than those from the margins, thinks our strange speaker, his sermons soaked in pools of echo amid peaks of noise lifted straight from the gravel of the worn down and yellowed suburbs.
