Tom Scholefield has created his own brand of hyperreality in his work as a graphic artist, forming a world where the real and the synthetic pile-up through colossal stacks of imagery. Human skulls, machinery, plant life, broken-down cars, barnacles, teeth, and satellite dishes all feature in his work, which includes the monochromatic cover art for Oneohtrix Point Never's Rifts and the more colorful 3D animation of Kuedo's video for "Ascension Phase". For the cover art of this debut album under his Konx-om-Pax moniker, Scholefield imagines a space where mountainous terrain is chiseled out to host to a large factory building, which in turn is under threat from reedy, grass-like tentacles slithering up around its metal façade. He stops short of imagining a future where these elements can peacefully co-exist, instead creating an anarchic face-off where humankind, machines, and the natural world are all straining to gain the upper hand.
It's a feeling that seeps into the music on Regional Surrealism, a mostly instrumental album caught somewhere between the chillwave-plundered "half-remembered childhood nostalgia" trope, impossibly severe dreams of the future, and the pastoral-electronic wistfulness of Scholefield's fellow countrymen Boards of Canada. That flitting back and forth between styles is emblematic of his wider work in the art and design fields, which has taken in projects with fellow Glaswegians Hudson Mohawke, Rustie, and Mogwai (whose Stuart Braithwaite features on "Zang-Tumb" from this record). Konx-om-Pax feels like various strains of abstract thought circling one another, with only the loosest of ties binding them together. It takes place in a juncture between the big and the small, the real and the unreal. On the vast "Pillars of Creation" Scholefield constructs a fantastic glacial empire all of his own; on "Let's Go Swimming" if feels like he's straining to see a reflection of himself in a tiny, muddy puddle.
That fissure quickly opens up when Regional Surrealism begins and never closes up into anything that could be described as a hermetic Konx-om-Pax sound. This material has been collected from various points in the past six or seven years according to an interview Scholefield recently gave to the Quietus, which helps explain its scattershot whims. "Intro" encroaches on the kind of plastic pining Joe Knight regularly conducts under his Rangers guise, while "Slootering" is a slavish piece of Perrey/Kingsley worship that directs the album down a surprisingly quirky detour following the growing feeling of atrophy that precedes it. "At Home with Mum and Dad" best represents the latter feeling, with a series of loops shifting lugubriously across the same axis of yearning/darkness that Demdike Stare try to bridge, where the sound moves so sluggishly that it resembles the actions of someone scaling a mountain with a sack of rocks tied to their back.
The abundance of gloom shouldn't be a total surprise-- the name "Konx-om-Pax" is taken from the title of a series of essays published in 1907 by famed occultist Aleister Crowley, himself a beloved reference point for myriad musicians from many different backgrounds over the years. Regional Surrealism is only loosely anchored in that domain, but it's when Scholefield crawls into those blackened corners that he can divine his most impressive material. "Glacier Mountain Descent" is particularly striking, offering a subtle twist on Werner Herzog's opening for Aguirre: The Wrath of God that hints at an ambition for Konx-om-Pax that far outstrips more frivolous material like the Braithwaite-featuring "Zang-Tumb". Those hints of humor are often symbolized in Scholefield's artworks, but here they have an unbalancing effect, only serving to detract from the portentous musical renderings of the uneasy symbiosis between digital glitch and the natural world. The potential for Konx-om-Pax feels boundless if he can find a way back to that latter space more often.
