Your Community Hub by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan (Review)

Inspired by the unrealized utopianism of ’60s and ’70s-era British architecture and urban planning, as well as the sounds of ’90s Warp Records, Gordon Chapman-Fox — who records under the Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan moniker — taps into the same hauntological vein as Ghost Box artists like The Advisory Circle and Pye Corner Audio. That is to say, this is music that’s undoubtedly retro and nostalgic, though not necessarily in a rose-colored way.

Chapman-Fox himself describes his own compositions as “music for a broken concrete utopia,” and there’s a definite sense of urban paradise lost in songs like “A Shared Sense of Purpose” and “Rapid Transport Links.” Whereas 2023’s excellent Building a New Town made use of acoustic guitar and light psychedelic flourishes, Your Community Hub relies heavily on ghostly synth melodies and arrangements. They envision lonely strolls through now-decrepit neighborhoods that vibrated with community and idealism until politics and changing social mores left them gutted and diminished.

Similarly, the title of “Summer All Year Round” may sound promising, and at first blush, Chapman-Fox’s synthesizers do seem bright and cheery. But there’s something unrelenting and ominous at work there, as well, like the sun beating down relentlessly on decaying concrete playgrounds and failing infrastructures.

Long-time Opus readers will know that I’m a sucker for music that imagines alternate histories and explores “the misremembered musical history of a parallel world” (to use Ghost Box’s pitch). Chapman-Fox goes a little deeper than that, however, using his music to probe the past to understand how and where it all went wrong.

In other words, it’s certainly possible to enjoy Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan as nothing more than excellently unsettling electronic music. But Chapman-Fox clearly has more on his mind; for starters, he’s not shy in his criticism of conservative British politicians “who have aimed to remove as much support and communality from the citizens as possible.” That only serves to make his music all the more interesting, evocative, and resonant for anyone who’s ever felt like our cities should be so much nicer, communal, and, well, modern than they actually are.