charles vaughan: documenting the decay

Limited to 200 CD in card sleeve. Finally, the debut from Charles Vaughan is with us. Ever since the mysterious arrival of the ‘April15th’ EP back in 2007, this album has been rumoured, along with a host of other slowly gestating projects which will all, hopefully, see the light of day on Wayside & Woodland Records sometime in the future. So, who is Charles Vaughan? Some may know him as the figure from the popular ’70s science fiction show ‘Survivors’, a character who dedicates himself to documenting, cataloguing and indexing what’s left of civilisation after a plague has wiped out 99% of the population. This was surely the inspiration on the musician behind the crumbling, mildewed sound-scapes to be found on Documenting The Decay. The music here, as mentioned above, is a collection of tape distressed instrumentals, mainly played on ancient synths, piano, old broken vinyl and the odd detuned zither. A copy recently found it’s way to the influential writer Simon Reynolds who wrote about it in a article on how ‘Hauntology’ (a term he himself coined) is far from dead, indeed, it is very much still ‘undead’. It’s safe to say that the music contained on the album could fit into that category, with it’s evocations of a future that never was, redundant technology left to rot and fading memories of post-war optimism. Musical reference points could include the work of William Basinski, Aphex Twin’s ambience, Eno and The Caretaker. But Charles Vaughan has very much carved out a peculiarly isolated area of his own, a strange, mouldy, spore marked environment in which he continues to produce these documents…