Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner. 

Craven Faults exist largely on their own terms and in their own world. They make analogue synth, ambient music, drone pieces that often extend to 15 or 20 minutes in length. The music is frequently inspired by landscapes, specifically the post-industrial, rural/ industrial landscape of northern England. Their albums tell tales of journeys through this terrain, paths and tracks walked for hundreds of years, back from post- to pre-industrial times, as weavers in clogs trekked over the moors to find work or farmers went looking for lost livestock.

Putting Craven Faults on your turntable or through your wireless speaker is to enter this world. It’s immersive and enveloping. It gives back what you bring to it. Some ambient music serves as a kind of balm, a relaxant, but Craven Faults don’t work like that. Their music is dark and ominous, admittedly uplifting at times, but primarily a mirror. If you’re feeling edgy or anxious, Craven Faults will bounce that right back. That’s on you, as they say.

Their latest album, Sidings, opens with Ganger, a repetitive kosmische synth riff with a long deep chord behind it. According to the artist, this isn’t a trip made with people in mind. Instead it describes a great engineering project of a bygone age, thousands of men working in cold and dangerous conditions, constructing a transport network – a railway line. Cutting tunnels through hillsides and building viaducts over valleys, blasting their way into the north. The Ganger of the title is, I’m assuming, the foreman of this group of workers. The leader of the gang building the railway, laying lines and track. Hammering giant spikes into the frozen ground. The composition gives you plenty of time to consider all this, 16 minutes and 20 seconds of it, and having read the narrative that accompanies the music – images of Victorian men in waistcoats and neckerchiefs, wearing hobnailed boots and caps – the sheer physical labour involved and the transformation of the rural countryside into the modern world, all flicker across my mind, in monochrome and sepia, naturally.

The sonic pictures Craven Faults paint, the landscapes and infrastructure, it’s all out there, on the moors and between the towns and cities. You can find it very easily in northern England. Drive up the M62 and stop somewhere between Manchester and Leeds or up the A1 somewhere in Yorkshire, before you get to Newcastle. Or go for a walk along the Pennines in Lancashire. Fields and roads, train tracks, crumbling warehouses, factories and mills. Forges and sheds, tunnels and canals, derelict or demolished railway stations (or converted ones, now someone’s home). It’s all still there.

There are seven more “songs” on Sidings, all part of this story. The titles alone giving some of it away – Yard Loup, Three Loaning End and Up Goods Distant, Down Goods Home. Stoneyman is 14 minutes of bells ringing and thundering synths. The bell like an express approaching through an unlit tunnel. Incline Huttes is shorter, its synths swirling and whirring, mimicking mechanical processes. Industrial production re-imagined as sound.

The album ends with the dancing arpeggios of Far Closes. All lightness now, as some sort of balance is struck between a pastoral past and the machine-driven modern. 

Craven Faults’ Sidings can be ordered directly from The Leaf Label. 

You can find more proper, on point, prose from Adam Turner over at his own brilliant blog, The Bagging Area. Adam is also part of the admin team at the mighty Flightpath Estate.