Chinese Benefits [LP]

A Large Sheet Of Muscle - Chinese Benefits [LP]

For Louis Johnstone, making music has never been about waiting for the right equipment, the right environment or the right moment. Across more than a decade of work as both Wanda Group and A Large Sheet Of Muscle, the Huddersfield-based musician has built one of British experimental music's most singular bodies of work by embracing whatever happens to be within reach, allowing instinct, improvisation and circumstance to shape the outcome as much as conscious composition. Recorded entirely on a failing iPhone 6 that stopped working shortly afterwards, Chinese Benefits isn't a record about damaged technology. It is a record shaped by it. Rather than resisting the limitations of the device, Johnstone allows them to become part of the music itself, where distortion, interference and deteriorating fidelity are inseparable from the recording process. Across twenty brief but disquieting pieces, corroded spoken word, environmental recordings, abrasive noise and fractured electronics continually emerge and dissolve. Voices drift in and out of range, reverberation stretches everyday sounds beyond recognition, and bursts of white noise interrupt moments of uneasy calm. There are echoes of radio transmissions, field recordings and musique concrète throughout, yet Chinese Benefits never settles comfortably into any one tradition. Instead, it inhabits a space where accident and intention become almost impossible to separate. That philosophy has long defined Johnstone's work. Through a vast catalogue of self-released recordings on his Umbro G imprint, alongside releases for labels including The Trilogy Tapes, he has consistently favored immediacy over refinement, embracing imperfection not as an aesthetic but as a practical reality. His recordings are less concerned with perfection than with capturing the conditions in which they were made. Looking back on Chinese Benefits, however, Johnstone's own assessment is characteristically understated. Like much of his work, Chinese Benefits offers few fixed meanings. Its titles remain cryptic, its voices partially obscured and its structures deliberately unstable. What emerges instead is a deeply personal document of process over perfection, where the limitations of the tools become inseparable from the music they produce, and where the act of making something matters far more than the conditions in which it was made.

Track Listing:

01. Our Illustrious Police
02. A 2 Year Old Boy
03. Nas Sewer
04. Tempo Pen
05. Stephen Bishop And Black God
06. I Live To Feed Animal
07. Tongues To The Middle East
08. Horse Incense
09. Biblical Tax Evasion
10. The Window Cleaner
11. Female Exposure Blues
12. Gas Expands And Reformation Chat
13. Communal Mishap
14. Medina Sod
15. Ventilated Yacht
16. I Passed Away In Plates
17. Pregnant In Weather
18. Liquid Mum
19. Popular Diet
20. Hmrc Widow