Gallops release ‘The Offa Society For Psychical Research’, the Welsh innovators' most intense, tar-black collection in their decade and a half history.

Intended as a pseudo-occult artefact documenting the paranormal investigations of an imaginary local association, the five-track collection steps away from the precision-engineered, AI-directed club music of recent Gallops releases to journey off-planet with an extraterrestrial, body-assailing techno that's savage and chittering with unseen doom.

Released on their own SKANDALKONZERT label, ‘The Offa Society For Psychical Research’ sees the independent unit - Mark Huckridge, Brad Whyte and Gavin Thorpe - embrace the more brutal, distorted sounds of industrial/EBM, the harsh futurism of Detroit techno, as well as ideas influenced by Gothic literature and 'weird fiction'.

Rather than melody and harmony, the focus here is minimalism, repetition, rhythm and mood, and for the most part, ‘The Offa Society For Psychical Research’ chills the blood.

Ominous prelude is 'Liquid & Envy', a scourging churn of stabbing sub bass and pitch-shifted synth squall that evokes early 1990s hardcore classic 'The Dominator' and conjures the sky-scraping menace of Lovecraft’s ‘Great Old Ones’.

The psycho-space horror unfolds further with 'Hemlock Chaser', a malevolent meld of stinging beats, beastly howls and gut-twisting guitar that staggers down through increasingly intoxicated gears. Signalling back to their more rockist origins, there's more guitar on these tracks that may be initially heard; processed, distorted and alloyed with electronics, they're uniquely bent out of recognition.

Much here seems crooked, fatally skewed; the face-flaying galactic EBM of 'Paint It Diseased' doesn't so much recall the music of the spheres as the buckled orbits of charred, dead planets and universe-sucking black holes.

Despite its title, 'The Crunching Teeth Of Sharks’ is more uncanny than terrifying, its watery, arpeggiating figures coiling around warmer, analogue soundscapes. That element of human-related nostalgia is welcome comfort; a point of light - perhaps a familiar sun - guiding us back home from the frozen interstellar expanse.

The temperate, more colourful skies of 'Youth Medium' suggest a place less inhospitable for human life, as if the blood-curdling visions and galactic truths imparted to the titular young psychic - their hands aloft, still spellbound to the beat - will soon be shared to the others gathered for the seance.
"One thing I hadn’t noticed until zooming out and looking at the track titles as a collection was how dark and ominous they are," says Huckridge, an inhabitant of Offa, the Wrexham ward named for the 8th century Mercian king where the entire EP was written and recorded.

The Offa Society For Psychical Research, he explains, refers to a fictional local group dedicated to the investigation of psychic phenomena; a "provincial Ghostbusters without the budget or sense of humour".

The EP functions as a false document, a device beloved of writers in the Gothic tradition from Bram Stoker to HP Lovecraft and the central conceit of 'The White People' by Arthur Machen, the once-forgotten Welsh author whose ideas are now recognised as being at the heart of the modern horror genre.

Alongside MR James, Machen was a weird fiction favourite in Huckridge's youth, and his spooky stories drew on pagan and mystical ideas as a method of understanding the modern world.

"I’ve developed a sceptical, but keen interest in the occult over the last few years, largely thanks to writings on Western esotericism by Colin Wilson, Erik Davis and Ramsey Dukes," says Huckridge, who is selling the rights to a short-lived sitcom based on the ideas behind the EP.

"It’s definitely not meant to be taken too seriously," he notes. "I’ve always been drawn towards anything dark/secret/mysterious, no matter how subjectively ridiculous, or whether I believe it. I just like things that go bump in the night, essentially."