Cindytalk Subterminal

“Cindytalk are pushing the boundaries of what music can be, reinventing and pursuing sonic possibilities, combining the actuality of the world with the imaginary and hallucinatory to create a magical, intriguing four-part work.”
— International Times, review of Subterminal

Cinder has been Cindytalk’s sole constant member since they started in the early 1980s. A series of band albums from Camouflage Heart (1984) to Wappinschaw (1995) saw the group develop an often uncompromisingly dark, intense and poetic body of work, with Cinder’s vocals complemented by music which moved between industrial, post-punk, ambient and fully improvised, while directly connecting across disciplines to performance, film and other media. DAIS Records (USA) are currently reissuing those albums in 2022-23.

Since 1995, Cindytalk has continued in both group and solo form, across live performance and recordings. During this period, Cindytalk increasingly embraced improvisation in live settings and electronic work through recordings. A series of solo and predominantly electronic albums on the Editions Mego label, from The Crackle of My Soul (2009) to The Labyrinth of the Straight Line (2016), saw another formidable body of work developed. Most recently, Of Ghosts and Buildings was released on the Japanese label Remodel in 2021, continuing Cinder’s integration of electronics with field recordings.

Cinder also recently recorded collaborative releases with Michael Wollenhaupt (Ancient Methods), In The Mouth Of The Wolf (Diagonal Records 2016), and with Massimo Pupillo (Zu), Becoming /// Animal - A Distant Hand Lifted, a live improvised work (Trost Records, 2017). A new Becoming /// Animal album with the addition of new member Abul Mogard is currently being recorded. Live work with both projects saw them perform at various festivals around Europe (Unsound in Krakow, Festival Alternativa Prague).

After periods in the USA and Japan, Cinder recently returned to Scotland, from where Cindytalk’s new album Subterminal was developed across 2020-21. The initial ideas for Subterminal were excavated from recordings developed during the process of making Of Ghosts and Buildings (2021). The resulting album continues and extends Cinder’s interest in longer- form compositions, which have been telegraphed since The Labyrinth of the Straight Line (2016).

Subterminal evokes an environmental, social and psychic breakdown, focusing on an approach to endings: the Subterminal position. The album is organised across four parts, charting a progression or suggesting a poetic narrative development across its 48 minutes — moving from hope to collective delusion, then to hallucination, and finally to escape.

A collaboration was struck between Cinder and visual artist Paul Tone on the selection and arrangement of images for the album packaging.

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“Cindytalk is a beautifully dark enigma. Having started life as a full band in the goth heyday of the 1980s, they now centre on the figure of Gordon Sharp/Cinder, who use the name to explore deep and mysterious electronic psycho-geography. On the surface, the music of Cindytalk could be described as “industrial” but scratch deeper and the breadth of their humanity becomes starkly real and inescapable.”

— Dusted Magazine

“Cindytalk have been a continual source of inspiration and one of the few remaining bastions of originality to me for well over twenty years.”
— Brutal Resonance

“I was surrounded by musics that were constantly regurgitating the past, and while there are specific influences in my work which come from the past, I did somehow want to try and push the music out as though it were broken signals trying to reach us from somewhere else, trying to come back at us from a distance or a time where sound and melody have been stripped, pulled apart and abused to the point where they just become broken signals.

I always perceived it as poetic; I perceived that what I was doing was creating a poetry of noise.”

— Cinder

Subterminal

Recorded by Cindytalk at Unthank, Glasgow Mastered by James Plotkin
Design by David Caines
Images by Paul Tone

Gatefold sleeve, with 8 page insert
More information: https://www.falsewalls.co.uk/release/subterminal/