Review: Beachers – The Interview
The title of this record refers to an evening spent cutting back and forth between two radio talk shows, bringing the voices of one programme into liason with the other. Beachers thereby illuminates the countless lines of dialogue that exist within radio: between presenter and guest, between on-air speaker and audience member and, as evidenced during the aforementioned experiment, between the voices of different radio stations as they intersect somewhere within the ether, forming a choir of which only one voice is physically audible at any given moment. In placing cheap, unreliable handheld radios at the centre, Beachers explores the notion of human agency navigating energies beyond its control, with the hand on the dial carving routes through these crossroads of static. Even the synthesiser lines here, like those pulses and murmurs that close out “Static Ecstatic”, carry a sense of nudging the unknown. The gestures are instigated by Beachers and then swept into a multitude of other forces, some more mysterious than others.
Aptly, The Interview is not an act of sonic assembly but a process of searching. It’s about asking the right questions to elicit potent answers, even if the content of those responses is unknowable. The loops on “Into The Crackles” feel haphazardly cut – the tail-end of a dying synth line, the last moments of an outbreath – yet they gather a sense of prophetic warning as repetition teases out their true emotional hues. And Beachers couldn’t have planned to tune into a broadcast of wailing violins (or operatic voices?) on “Happiness Isn’t The Struggle”, yet his decision to swathe the harmonies within folds of static, denying the listener the beauty of the full signal, is both masterful and heartbreaking. So much of the record occupies that blustering interstice of so-called “dead air”, dwelling upon that bid for connection, stranded in the charged quiet that hangs off the edge of a question and awaits the assemblage of an answer. Yet just how the intercut talk shows splice together queries and completely unrelated responses, as mirrored in the plethora of vocal cut-ups and reversed utterances throughout, The Interview suggests that no response will be fundamentally coherent enough to truly close the loop of our eternal enquiry.
