5 out of 5

Label: Fonolith

Produced by: Neil Scrivin

I love… all of this.

Okay, I’m about to gush over presentation, which is hard to fully separate from the music, but let’s talk about the music as well: The Night Monitor has (mostly) served as Neil Scrivin’s way of musically soundscaping supernatural / unexplainable events – historical alien or cryptid sightings – through ambient scratches of radio static and theremin-like synths, crackling across scene setting narratives. I am sometimes put out by some discrepancy between the style of music and the eras being scored, or some beats where Scrivin’s approach maybe doesn’t “tell” the story perfectly.

Extracted from a 2020 radio show, Phantom Circuit, this first Perception Report EP takes a step back from being more specific into the general, aiming more to capture a vibe that matches its “I Want to Believe” style cover, described as “chronicling borderland excursions into assorted strangeness.” It is a late, warm night, parked somewhere remote, staring up at a dark sky and wondering…

PR 1 taps into something more universal, then, but by doing so – by capturing a feeling I feel like many with the opportunity to have some time alone and ponder the star-lit aether – by nailing that generalized cross-over between curiosity and wariness of the bigness of the beyond, Scrivin is able to make this short report hit home, and feel very personal. Its six tracks wander through aforementioned static and ambient fuzz, occasionally tuning in to radio-dial squiggles of keys, tip-toeing somewhere between 60s sci-fi library music (Doctor Who; midnight movies) and drone-like pulses of tape-recorded “silence.” Kept to its EP length, the effect is perfect: the moment is maintained.

And then you get the beautiful overkill of the packaging, which has a zine of archival photos and newspaper clippings on UFOs, an actual blank “report” for filling out about your UFO sighting, and some buttons and stickers to proclaim your ufologist flag proudly. The presentation makes me fall in love. So while there is surely bias there, I gave more time over to celebrating the music… making this worth your time even if you can’t track down a physical copy with all its fixins.