I’VE been reading some of the writing by those music bloggers they have nowadays. You know the ones, with their skinny lattes, even skinnier jeans and complicated hair.

It seems that the current trend is all about juxtapositions and I was thinking just how they might approach Pattern Language’s intriguing sound in one of those achingly hip publications.

They may try to suggest that this is Vangelis’s Dusseldorf years or Jean Michel Jarre getting a dance groove on, use terms such as indietronica or reference the Krautrock motorik sound. It all looks good on paper but I’m not sure it gets to the heart of the matter.

But it is a lot more than an exercise in cherry picking past glories. The instrumentals found on Total Squaresville are nothing if not contemplating the future, sometimes the far future and Blade Runner-esque cityscapes and Isaac Asimov book covers seem to be intrinsically linked to the music.

And for all its grandiose imagery and often-clinical qualities the music is also somehow surprisingly romantic and overwhelmingly beautiful.

It is the stuff of atonal music boxes and digital fugues, of escapism and longing, and, for all its conjuring of space vistas and alien encounters, it never seems anything less than rooted in the now and locked on to a human heart and soul. - Dave Franklin