Time to Dream but Never Seen (Feb 28th 2020)

Time to Dream but never Seen.
Release Date Feb 28th 2020

 Credits
All Tracks written by
Keith Seatman
Except*
Seatman and Powell
Music
Keith Seatman
Words and Voice
Douglas E Powell 
Produced by
Keith Seatman and Jack Packer
© Keith Seatman 2019
Many Thanks to
Jim Jupp for Sleeve Notes and Audio Advice
Simon Heartfield Audio Advice
Jez Stevens for Video
Colin Morrison at Castles in Space
Nick Taylor for Artwork/Design
Antony at RedRed Paw Mastering

CiS would like to thank Spencer Robinson for
invaluable production support
Cat: CiS042

 Keith Seatman’s music is an anachronistically repurposed assemblage of sounds, melodies and technologies plundered from different time zones. Perhaps no surprise as he lives and records a stone’s throw from the jaded, yet jaunty seafront of Southsea in Portsmouth on the south coast of England. This album however is far from being a haphazard and spontaneous collage. Keith’s busy and dense soundworld is composed though a very deliberate and painstaking process. Unlikely musical and sonic juxtapositions artfully evoke a sense of place and narrative. This latest excursion is bad-trip psychedelia shot through with wistful and whimsical melodies and occasional haunted voices.
So, on Last One In for example, what could be a chirpy and exciting theme tune to a 1970s kid’s adventure series is modulated into a minor key by a sinister synth bass line and menaced by a stomping bother boy rhythm. In the opening track On to the Pier & Down to the Sea, the amusement arcade din is submerged in a watery digital swirl during. Likewise, on Tippy Toe Tippy Toe the tiddly-om-pom-pom of the pier is heard from the point of view some approaching aquatic creature or perhaps by a drowning man. This track heralds the closing section of the album which shifts focus from the seafront to its rustic precursor, the mayday fair. Something weird comes to the village in Waiting by the Window. Sounding as if late period Radiophonic Workshop (when they got hold of expensive synths) had popped back 15 years to work with their boffinish tape wielding forbears. It summons an atmosphere like a Nigel Kneale drama or one of those folk-horror inspired episodes of Dr.Who. 
Finally, the album’s title track seems to offer a chance of escape to a more rustic idyll 
with melancholy mellotron flute and mumbled nursery rhymes. But as the album 
closes it feels like a relentlessly inescapable holiday-special steam train drags us back
On to the Pier & Down to the Sea. Jim Jupp, Ghost Box Records   (extract Sleeve Notes)