Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams (Soundtrack) vinyl

After releasing the superb new album from Bristol's Sophia Loizou, Ricardo Donoso's Kathexis label return to the soundtrack work of Alex Menzies. Known for his work as Alex Smoke among other aliases, Glaswegian Menzies has a strong discography at the forefront of techno but has more recently turned his hand to composing soundtracks. Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams is the second soundtrack Menzies composed for the BBC, providing music for a documentary narrated by Professor Simon Schaffer that the story of the automata clockwork devices built hundreds of years ago with the intent to mimic and recreate life. Much of the instrumentation used for Menzies' carefully constructed score was also of the type actually incorporated into automatons, including bells, chimes and wind organs. Percussive patterns scattered throughout the cues are samples of machines moving, gears grinding, halting, some of them automatons themselves.