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Your support makes all the difference.Cursor Miner – the very name suggests a kind of digital digging, the working of a new seam of musical language appropriate to the computer age. Odd, then, that this first album from the Chichester bedroom boffin Rob Tubb should be so resolutely retro, building on developments of previous eras – specifically, 1980s "futurist" electro-pop and Syd Barrett's painful playtime visions, with the main tracks punctuated by shorter bursts of prickly, Zappa-esque musique concrète, with titles such as "Scrapma" and "Bezerk One". It's an odd blend of influences, by turns innocent, ironic and utopian: one moment Tubb is warbling whimsical nonsense wordplay such as "humidify your horny gremlins" over acoustic guitars; the next, he's hymning time-saving technology in "Remote Control", a sort of hyperactive relative of Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator": "Saving time and saving knees/ Don't have to get out of bed/ You can do it all by infrared." The echoes of Gary Numan and early (pre-split) Human League are nicely turned in "U Want to Want" and "Propaganda", and sound more persuasively futuristic than the big-beat number "Battery Powered Joy" (about another time-saving hand-held device), and the burping, farting synths and squeaks of "Bodily Function", a sort of baby Daft Punk exercise. The Barrett influence is perhaps best realised in "Like DNA", an idiot savant apprehension of reality, featuring the advice: "Be what you find alone/ Don't leave your mind alone." Wise words – and in its single-minded pursuit of a distinctive musical agenda, Explosive Piece of Mind finds Cursor Miner practising what he preaches.
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