Violet Cowboy, “Ramraid at the Wiggly Worm”

A musical thought process that feels glitchy, crackly, and Radiophonic, rumbling occasionally into the hinterlands of Aphex Twin. Read full story on the Bandcamp Daily .

Brighton on the English South Coast has always been weird. It was built almost from scratch as a hedonistic playground by the foppish Prince Regent, later King George IV, just over 200 years ago—and ever since has attracted waves of freaks, cultists, ravers, lowlifes, and oddballs. Nowadays, it’s beset by gentrification, chain restaurants, media folk and wellness gurus, but just under the surface it still has the air of “a town that is constantly helping the police with their enquiries” as the writer Keith Waterhouse put it in the 1970s.

And now, as ever, hidden away from the seafront clubs and big indie gigs, it has a wellspring of genuine eccentricity clinging on to its surreality in basement flats, weird jam sessions above pubs, smelly poetry readings, and weird conversations that go on for weeks. Stephen Maskell, aka (among many other aliases) Violet Cowboy, is the sine qua non of this damp, itchy, hallucinatory local spirit. His ambience and electronica is the sound of someone with too much space to think, too many peculiar people suggesting bad ideas, and very possibly too much contact with ghosts.

It’s glitchy, crackly, Radiophonic in its hints of old British electronic soundtracks, rumbling occasionally into the hinterlands of Aphex Twin-world; but rather than feeling studied or the product of connection to any scene, it’s incredibly personal. It really feels like you’re accessing a long, unfolding thought process. And then there’s the spoken and sung words in various voice, which is where it gets really odd.

The first words you hear on the album are “When I poke him, it feels like cardboard,” in a story about sad dog-sitting, and that perfectly sets the feeling for the synaesthesiac discomfort to come. Phrases like “Do the disco damage” and “Elizabeth I resembles Sonia from EastEnders” emerge from rambling narrations and get into your head like worms. It fits into an old British tradition of absurdist mind-melt like Lewis Carroll, Chris Morris, Mark E Smith, and Vivian Stanshall, and it perfectly fits into the electronic sound such that, if you soak in it, the whole thing ceases to be about sound and music and becomes an opiated dream, a frayed fairytale.

But if you know Brighton and its musical and artistic fringes, there’s a whole other sense of falling through a portal. Even if you’ve never been to the place, if you know Wevie Stonder and the Spymania label, if you know Meemo Comma and Ibrahim Alfa Jr, if you know the Spirit of Gravity collective which birthed the Wrong Music label and thus breakcore as we know it, if you know Disastronaut or messed-up rockers The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster and the various projects they spawned, then you’ll understand this is not something that exists in a vacuum.

This is sound and vision that comes from the free-associating subterranean subconscious, and pass-the-parcel late night interactions, of an endlessly, endlessly peculiar town.