Currently coming at the rate of an EP a month (please do keep up), Nina Walsh’s Woodleigh Research Facility’s archival excavation, Maximum Vaultage, has now reached Volume 5. 

Mystery Chain and Low Hanging Fruit are fine examples of WRF’s trademark brand of dance floor electro. Marvellous missives of machined marching. The former is a sleazy, midtempo, Skatt Brothers / Walk The Night-esque stomp, with a cowbell intro and backwards subs that buzz its icy sequencing. The latter, in contrast, boasts an uplifting, defiant, triumphant bass melody and fizzing FX. Alternating between soft, subtle trippy treated bell chimes, and brighter, bolder blasts of synth as it goes. 

Gagging Order, however, is something quite different. Swapping the “electro” for “electro-acoustic” and a sonic aesthetic far more organic. Sounding like an outtake from Walsh and Andrew Weatherall’s techno-pagan Fort Beulah project. Constructing a broken, wounded tango from loops of rattling, clattering ritual hand percussion and carefully, expertly picked zither strings. Analogue appliances and digital devices add trickling treated noises and spinning tape effects, while the picking is teased out, snippet by snippet, over 8 minutes into a soundtrack suitable for sipping a Chocolate Milk & Brandy and watching a Mediterranean sunset. 

Woodleigh Research Facility’s Maximum Vaultage Volume 5  can be ordered directly from Bandcamp.