Review: Leo Chadburn - Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator (Library of Nothing)

With a near 20 year background in experimental, avant-pop, art-rock, neo-classical music, Leo Chadburn (aka Simon Bookish) releases his eight album, the follow-up to 'Sleeper / Talker' (2021) with 'Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator' as a four part personal spoken word/poem electronica: think it's time to wake up and smell the AC.

Leo has appeared on various Radio stations including BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 3, BBC 6 Music, Resonance FM (London Music/Arts Station and former home of Jonny Trunk's OST show) which gives the idea that he's hard to pigeon hole and 'Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator' does nothing to dispell this idea.

The press release that comes with this says, to be filed alongside "Éliane Radigue, Robert Ashley, Delia Derbyshire, Derek Jarman" and it's interesting to note that Derbyshire (the BBC Radiophonic workshop pioneer) moved to London from Coventry in the West Midlands where she'd been haunted by World War 2 bombing raids and Jarman (Film Maker, Gay Rights Activist) moved from London to a small cottage on a beach near the Dungeness nuclear power station).  

Chadburn himself moved from his hometown of Coalville, Leicestershire to London to train at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama so he's got memories of the period of ruination of the Midland's industrial powerbase at the time of his upbringing and that's where the story of this album starts.

So you wonder what the album title refers?  Well, in the olden days, most kids will know an Alternator as something you'd put on the back wheel of your bicycle to generate electric to power front and rear lights; it might slow you down and make a drone like noise, but it was cost effective option until they bike alternators were banded: being dangerous as no wheel rotation meant no lights.  So is Leo, sleeping in the shadow of this history?  

The opening track, 'The Body Becomes A View Finder' certainly feels that way in a sort of love/hate poem to the East Midlands' industrial revolution past of coal mining and transport links with dark drone backing.  Think Ivor Cutler as a non-funny jester dreaming of a lost world where minerals were not the bedrock the Social Media experiment.

'The Magic Flora Of The East Midlands' sounds like it should be a book of herbal apothecary by Julian Cope (long time resident of Tamworth, which is nearby) but sounds like a monastic chant set to warped electronica: Leo is joined on this track by George Barton on glass chimes and mark tree(?)

In additon to the "close-miked spoken word", mostly monotone, Leo plays all the other 'instruments' on the album including drum, bass recordeer, bowed vibraphone, cymbals, glockenspiel, harmonica, harmonium, prepared piano, vessels, shortwave radio, tam tam, thundersheet, synths and more.  And most of these get included on 'Move Like A Freight Train' which sounds very much like a freight train, with alternator, heavy loads, wagon full of coal, televisions, microfische; "like a freight train".   As you might guess, I'm old enough to have used a microfiche reader but I've no idea what he's talking about (although it does seem that we're approaching the apocolypse).  I do like the pace of the track, not exactly Buzzcock's 'Late For The Train' but great in the Ian Allan world of spotters.

By the time we get to the last track, 'It Is A Beautiful Day (1000 Years Later)' Leo, seems to have envisioned Jarman's Dungeness has reverted to a Gravesend of promordial soup of electric space travelling organisms in a re-imagined OST to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If you're a fan of WIRE magazine this is out-there as experimental music.  If you're a fan of talking books of a working class escapism/fantasy/alt.digital nomadism, Poetry Now (BBC Radio 4), you'll want to get into this.  As someone who originall grew up in the West Midlands, in the 90s once nearly blagged a ride home on a Freight train from Derby to London (I knew the driver) and ex-subscriber to WIRE, I get this as a four-part retro-futuristic monlogue set to experimental music and it's more fun than you'd think.

There's a full 'Gerry Hectic' interview with Leo on The Tonearm - check it out HERE

Artist: Leo Chadburn 
Title: Sleep In the Shadow Of The Alternator
Release date: 9th August, 2025
Cat. No: TBC

Label: Library of Nothing
Format: Bandcamp / Digital