Iglooghost builds his own post-human world on new album Tidal Memory Exo
On his third album, the Bristol-based artist imagines an alternative world in a post-Brexit British seaside town. ✍️ - Günseli Yalcinkaya
When a geomagnetic storm scrambled the temporal drift of a small seaside town on the south-east coast of England, strange prehistoric creatures began washing up to shore, catching the attention of a group of hooded, scrap-collecting weirdos from the local music ‘tidal’ scene. “People began picking up all this ancient, sticky stuff, like old artefacts from the beach beats and flipping them for profit,” explains Iglooghost, the musical alias of Bristol-based multidisciplinary artist Seamus Malliagh. “They’re making these pirate transmission radios and playing this weird music that I’m trying to get involved with.”
He wrote his third album Tidal Memory Exo while squatting in an MOT garage in Kent (”It’s a really cursed, DIY, fake house inside some garage,” he says). The record takes inspiration from these bleak surroundings, imagining an alternative world where ecological disaster has birthed an post-human wasteland inhabited by ancient fossils, which are believed to be the remains of a trilobite civilisation possessing proto-intelligence. “We were right by the beach, but it was like the most brutal, dire southeast England beach possible,” he expands. “I think, since Brexit, they stopped being able to import the water treatment chemicals from Europe so they were just spewing sewage into the water.”
To be clear, the above description is all fiction. Just as his 2021 album Lei Line Eon imagined an ancient musical tradition inspired by the geoglyphic ley lines of his native Dorset, Tidal Memory Exo takes place in a parallel Britain on the brink of ecological collapse, where the music acts as the entry point into an entire fantasy universe dreamt up by Malliagh. Drawing on his experiences living on the actual Kent coastline, the album takes the murky landscape of the post-Brexit seaside as the starting point for a rich narrative, revolving around a local ‘trench‘ music scene, which has been cut off from the rest of the country following the geomagnetic storm. To further intensify the lore, the release of Tidal Memory Exo is accompanied by a Reddit-style messaging board, where users debate scene beef and micro-genres of the local scene – such as trench wave, sporestyle and foamtek, while an online marketplace sells encrusted shells and smashed-up effigies dedicated to a cryptid named memree.
“I’m really drawn to these pseudo-scientific ideas of pre-human civilisations where people think that an entire society could disappear from the fossil record,” Malliagh says, breaking the fourth wall. “The sea front was just this brutalist concrete facade. But, yeah, that was the environment I was in and it was really fun to project some kind of narrative onto it. It was a culture-less wasteland, but I wanted to imagine what it would be like if it was the place where everything was happening.”
“I think that was what inspired a lot of this, the fact that the narrative around this album is fake scene storytelling, about the development of genres and subcultures and stuff. The whole thing is just fiction to me” – Iglooghost
Sonically, the album teems with pummelling electronics, mini-mutating frequencies and beats that crash like tidal waves against the walls of rusted sea urchins. “It’s an aquatic album but in a fossilised, sewage-ridden, decaying type of way,” he affirms. It’s also the first time that Malliagh uses his own vocals on the album, combining growling rap sonics with a mixed palette of musical genres and styles, to evoke the feeling of listening to a coastal radio broadcast situated in a fictional timeline.
He traces the decision to build a fictional music scene to growing up in the rural countryside, where he spent much of his childhood watching music scenes unfold in big cities on the television screen. “I think growing up quite isolated from real-life culture in the countryside, I could only really hear stories about exciting subcultural, new youth movements, particularly music. These things became exaggerated and cartoonified,” he explains. “Growing up, watching documentaries about the Hacienda and everything seemed so cinema-like. It’s just through the lens of talking heads telling these anecdotes. I think that was what inspired a lot of this, the fact that the narrative around this album is fake scene storytelling, about the development of genres and subcultures and stuff. That’s all I really know about it. The whole thing is just fiction to me.”
There’s a lot that can be read into the murky world that informs Tidal Memory Exo. The environmental themes recall the fantasy writings of Ursula Le Guin, or the cybernetic quality of Sadie Plant’s writing on The Great Oxidation Event in Zeroes and Ones – described as “the greatest pollution crisis the earth has ever known”. It mirrors Malliagh’s own primordial lore – his elaborate tales of ancient fossils being washed up to shore spiral towards a distant past, and hint at humanity’s own future. It could be an entire narrative on its own, a plot for a novel or blockbuster film, but on Tidal Memory Exo, it serves only as liminal background noise to the album itself – ”tunes about oceanic scum, illegal teletext transmissions, and the prehistoric trilobite angels lurking in the sewers” – a story within a story if you will.
It doesn’t stop there, as Malliagh has currently embarked on a tour for the album, the performance for which includes his very own rock formations (a collaboration with FKA twigs collaborator Yaz XL), which project cryptid light shows across the audience. Yet once it’s over, he plans to leave Tidal Memory Exo’s world behind to explore new terrain. “I don’t like blurring shit together, I really draw a line between these little worlds,” he concludes. “The next one will be completely unrelated I think. I might one day try and join everything up, that would be wild.”
Tidal Memory Exo is out now
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