Craven Faults, Sidings

Craven Faults has spent nearly a decade making music about the ground under his feet. The project takes its name from the Craven Fault System in the Pennines, the man behind it lives in Yorkshire and goes unnamed, and his records combine analogue synthesizers with field recordings, per Wikipedia's entry. Sidings, released January 23 on The Leaf Label, is his third double album after Erratics & Unconformities and Standers, and it is the one where the method finally sounds like a place rather than a technique.

A route, not a story

Leaf's announcement describes the record as a journey with no people at its center. It starts in an isolated community built around a 19th-century engineering job with 14 tunnels and 22 viaducts, and ends at an enclosed field on a moor in 1858. Those numbers match the Settle-Carlisle line, whose construction camps near Ribblehead housed more than 2,000 navvies. The label adds a second map laid over the first: recording studios from Los Angeles to Rochdale between 1952 and 1980. The Bandcamp notes mention a livestock market, an inn and a railway platform along the way, and describe the sequence as a loop that returns to where it began.

That sounds like a lot of homework for an instrumental synth record, and the titles lean into it: "Ganger," "Yard Loup," "Up Goods Distant, Down Goods Home," "Drover Hole Sike." But the concept mostly works as a discipline. It tells him when to stay put and when to move.

Three long hauls

The structure is the giveaway. Bandcamp lists eight tracks running about 69 minutes, and three of them, "Ganger" (16:20), "Stoneyman" (14:25) and the closer "Far Closes" (15:39), take up roughly two thirds of it. The five pieces in between run from three and a half to six minutes, which counts as short in this catalog.

The long tracks are where the motorik lineage shows. Treble hears Krautrock pulse throughout and calls "Stoneyman" one of several 15-minute builds that hypnotize. Arcana's Ben Hogwood describes "Ganger" as shimmering figures over a warm, wide drone, "Stoneyman" opening on a bell tone before a drum enters at a slow, threatening tread, and "Far Closes" riding a steady kick under slowly shifting melodic cells. The effect is closer to a long walk than a long jam: the pulse is a pace, not a groove, and the changes arrive at the speed a horizon changes.

The detours

The shorter pieces are where Sidings earns its replays. "Three Loaning End" is built on processed harpsichord and synth, per Treble, and Hogwood points to its slower, unusually catchy rocking rhythm. "Drover Hole Sike," Treble adds, pairs deep bass with organ, drums and choral vocal samples, a rare human-sounding texture on a record that otherwise keeps people at a distance. "Incline Huttes" scatters light melodic fragments over a bass drone. None of these are pop songs, but they give the album a rhythm of arrival and departure that the earlier double albums, with their long uninterrupted spans, did not always have.

The pulse is a pace, not a groove.

What it costs

The patience cuts both ways. Long stretches of Sidings change so slowly that listeners not already tuned to this kind of kosmische will hear repetition where fans hear weather, and user ratings on Album of the Year are noticeably cooler than the critic average. The anonymity also means there is no persona to hang the record on, only gear, places and dates. Leaf has leaned into collectors instead, with a run of colored 2LP editions, a photobook and a four-CD box that pairs Sidings with remasters of Bounds, "May Birching" and the Thwaite Watermill live set, per the label.

Verdict

Sidings does not reinvent Craven Faults. It sharpens him. The three long pieces carry the weight, the five short ones supply the variety, and the railway frame gives a hardware-heavy project a sense of distance traveled. For anyone who has waited for a modular record that feels rooted in an actual place, this is the one to start with.