An all electronic, all keyboard playing, all male sextet from the Oxford area offer up a fine 12 track debut album of spacey ambience.
The multi-tracked keyboards revolve around sequenced drum beats to create a gentle floating in space soundscape - the kind of electronica which labels like Warp and Leaf specialise in.
The album's title is taken from place names in a sparsely populated area of Southen Ireland near where it was recorded, apparently to conjure up the sense of being a relatively insigificant part of a much broader landscape.
It opens inauspiciously with a one minute organ piece titled 'The Drone of the Hearse' but thankfully the journey thereafter is less funereal. This is one of four one minute scene setters for the eight longer tracks which range from melodic glitchy pieces such as Macondo to darker atmospherics of 'The Shiver' and 'Bugs'.
Despite the broadly optimistic glow there are edges of darkness to balance thing s up. 'Bugs', for instance, is built around clips from a post-nuclear Protect And Survive' type broadcast ("stay tuned to this wavelength but switch off your radio now to save your batteries").
Such voice samples, in lieu of vocals, are used sparingly but effectively.
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Perhaps, the most ambitious track is 'In This Situation, Thinking Won't Help' with DJ Shadow style hip-hop beats and the inclusion of the voice of a crazed sounding preacher-man.
The closing track ('Electrical Unity') uses a natural history voiceover describing an insect world where there were "no vertical preditors" other than other insects. The calm voice imparting this information gives the same charm that you get from the work of Future loop Foundation
The danger with the anti-analogue approach of music in this genre is that the sound can often come acroos as just too chilled and remote. The Keyboard Choir seem conscious of this risk since, although they operated within an artifical organic free zone, their celebration of electricty avoids sounding too mechnical and pre-programmed.
To paraphrase the car publicity of Nissan you could say this sounds like it was 'made by robots - played by humans'.
12 t - 57.04 (incl. one minute 'hidden' noise track)
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