Past and future blur together in the slipstream of British experimentalist Andrew PM Hunt’s music as Dialect. Since he first began working under the moniker a decade ago, he’s swirled together ghostly recordings of traditional instruments and ultra-glossy electronics, smudging the boundaries until it’s hard to tell what’s played, sampled, or synthesized—a fog of memory and fantasy, of here and hereafter. He’s talked about his process in near-utopian terms. “Making music,” he says, “is a way of saying ‘this is what we are’ or ‘this is what we could be.’”
For his latest EP, Full Serpent, he maps out his utopia with new confidence. The record is intended as something like an epilogue to his 2024 album Atlas of Green, which told the story of a musician named Green from the distant future. Press materials describe the character’s journey to unearth “lost signals” from “the sediments of technology and time.” In practice, that meant something similar to his past records—fragments of human voices breaking through collages of tape loops and glitchy errata, warmed by colorful sequences of alien synth work. But the story—inspired by the writing of Italian philosopher Federico Campagna, as well as Ursula K. Le Guin’s anthropological sci-fi works—provides emotional heft and narrative direction that make every moment of vaporous synthwork feel purposeful and vital.
Full Serpent is intended to offer more of Green’s adventures in a future landscape where the past is always poking through the dust, bubbling over with color and life. The palette of this new record is quite similar: largely treated samples of recorded instruments, distant vocals, and prismatic synth programming. Some of the record’s compositions are, in fact, collages of sounds and recordings initially made for its predecessor. Full Serpent literally opens with what sounds like a tape rewinding. But even across the EP’s brief 18 minutes, Hunt makes clear that there are still corners in this world ripe for discovery, mysterious doorways looming in the landscape, waiting to be traversed.
The pieces that emerged from this process are among Hunt’s most vibrant and otherworldly. “Ev’ry Portal Past” is a joyous assemblage of chirping vocal samples, fluttering electronics, and hazy melodies like the first rays of sunshine breaking across a desert landscape. Rarely have Hunt’s compositions felt so jittery and full of life as the title track, which blooms from murmuring drones into shimmering bokehs of synth programming. Burbling with the ecstatic energy of early Warp Records and the playful scrawls of ’80s new age autodidacts, it’s wide-pupiled electronic music that pulls at the edges of every melody.
Even the record’s shorter pieces—like the delicately squiggling “Sky Receiver” or the bubbling, barely minute-long “Little Fragment”—have a sense of restless motion. The motives of Hunt’s main character are abstract, to say the least. Largely wordless and loosely structured, it’s a bit difficult to follow the narrative, if Hunt actually envisions one. But through his buoyant compositions, Hunt expresses a sense of relentless exploration that reverberates through each slivered sample and squirming synth line. You never quite know where each piece will go, and by the time you’ve caught up to his latest move, he’s onto the next.
