Polypores

Stephen James Buckley makes music in a spare room in a terraced house in Preston, and the gap between that fact and the results is part of what makes Polypores worth paying attention to. Working entirely with modular synthesizers — instruments that reward patience and punish complacency — he has released dozens of records across Castles in Space, Polytechnic Youth, and Crackedankles, each built around its own imaginary world: a submerged ocean civilization, a pixelated RPG wilderness, a woodland where the trees have grown to unreasonable sizes. By trade he is a studio sound engineer. By practice he is something harder to name.