Industrial Growth is the new longplayer by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. First emerging in 2020, Gordon Chapman-Fox‘s Warrington-Runcorn project explores the modernist utopian aesthetic of the UK’s post-war new town development programme through timeless retro-futurist electronic music. Encompassing the programme’s progressive optimism and the dystopian echoes of its failure, the project has since explored a compelling range of connected ideas and resonances across a prolific body of work.
Expanding on the ambient excursions of earlier material, Industrial Growth augments Warrington-Runcorn’s scintillating sound world with profuse volumes of distortion and dissonance, across arguably the project’s darkest LP to date. With sleek, engrossing synthesis, Kraftwerkian odysseys, proto-kosmische and uncanny atmospheres, the album dramatically confronts the spectre of societal decline. A stark, unflinching evolution for the project, it retains the civic mystique of Warrington-Runcorn’s best work while adding an increasingly uncompromising spirit.
“My music has been getting heavier and heavier over the years”, says Chapman-Fox. “As my music often reflects my feelings on the outside world, this is very much a visceral response to our current times. There’s always been a darkness to my work, but this felt like the time to unleash it all”.
A captivating record filled with murk and menace, Industrial Growth hints at hidden undercurrents and insidious forces, as Chapman-Fox reveals: “The ‘growth’ of the title isn’t about economics, this is something far more organic, eating away at our society.”
With the brutal, glowering sturm und drang of album opener ‘This Machine’, there’s the immediate sense of a gauntlet being thrown down. The discordant dread, jackhammer rhythms and searing white noise of this opening make for a monumental statement of intent. The track segues beautifully into ‘The Wire’, a passage which evokes the cyclical reprises of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express, with Chapman-Fox reiterating and reshaping abiding musical themes and ideas.
A pervasive gloom hangs across the tracks ‘Warrington Bank Quay’ and ‘Heavy Industry’, yet there’s still a sparkling beauty to be found at the heart of this music; an irrefutable sense of motion, dynamics, the use of light and shade. Chapman-Fox describes ‘Heavy Industry’ as a “rare moment of light” in all this. Evoking John Carpenter composing an iconic soundtrack theme for a lost public information film, it’s a stirring, resplendent highlight.
The album progresses fearlessly, from the eerie machine music of ‘Parkside’ to the hypnotizing industrial kosmische of ‘Post Industrial Policy’ – like Chris & Cosey collaborating with Klaus Schulze – and into the melancholic dark ambient mist of ‘Astmoor’. Closing with the sublime, noise-contorted havoc of ‘Industrial Unrest’, Chapman-Fox ends an immense, foreboding album with one of his most discordant tracks to date. It’s a thrilling climax to an intransigent, hard-hitting work that bravely and cathartically contends with the adversities and injustices of our contemporary moment.
The majority of the album is part of a suite that was commissioned by Roadburn Festival for their 2024 edition in Tilburg, Netherlands. The studio version has been in gestation since then, with tracks being further honed on a tour of the UK.
The album is complimented on Bandcamp by a bonus remix of the lead track ‘This Machine’ by TVAM. “I’ve worked with Joe from TVAM in the past. We grew up in the same area, and he’s an absolute joy”, says Chapman-Fox.
Designed by Chapman-Fox, the artwork is complemented by Michael Cooke, whose illustrations have appeared on the previous albums Districts, Roads, Open Space and Your Community Hub. Michael grew up in Runcorn and much of the artwork is based on his first-hand experience of living in the town.