Post Office records

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	Operation Julie	Chapel Couture
	Zeitgeist Whore	Faradays Folly
	Delia	Control Mantra
	Mathematicae	Disinfectant Boy Blues
	Light
	City Based Inbreeding
	Tarashel
POR9 Chapel Couture Ministry of Defiance October 2003
The first album of 2003 from West Wales' prolific electronica hero might be his best yet. You might get off on his extreme beatless drone or his lofi clattertechno, or both or none of these. Chapel Couture, Handfords second album as Ministry of Defiance, perhaps covers the widest sonic base, however.Although we begin with a bewitching rush of spooky soundtrack chords, you know this is not going to be one of Handfords easier terms from track two, Zeitgeist Whore, where Meg from Cardiff grrrl/buuy punks Naughty swears over a blistered blizzard of electric distortion. From here on in its a whirl through blunt samples, knotted percussion, flailing disc fuzz and tonal extremity which sounds like bagpipes being looped in deepest space. 
This is proper DIY electronica, done without a care for the whims of outsiders - and it shows, in a good way. There are few people around making music as honest and real as Dave Handford.
NOEL GARDNER -- SOUNDNATION - SEPT 2003

The latest release on this ever-prolific Llandudoch label sees sonic avant-gardist Dave Handford indulging in sinister organic synth instrumentals worthy of the BBCs Radiophonic Workshop. The caustic rhythmic patterns of earlier releases are as prevalent as ever, but are complemented as often as not by endlessly looped and discordant synth lines, and a variety of disembodied voices taken seemingly at random from Radio 4 broadcasts. The effect is to create a strangely ethereal atmosphere, most successfully on 'Delia' and 'Light'.
Watch out for some live dates early next year.
VIVA SPARKY FANZINE -- NOVEMBER 2003

This trails a very indie 1979 mood, as if the kids from the Ministry had just heard Throbbing Gristle for the first time and said, 'hey, let's make our own crazy record right here in the bedroom!'. The sleeve feels post-punk DIY, hand done with care: likewise the tone of the synths is not so much Powerbook sharp as Casio wonky, and even the sampled BBC voices and some titles ('Operation Julie'?) sound nostalgically far away. Even if it ends on a Jack Straw loop about weapons of mass destruction, it still feels like it was recorded in winter 1979 and held in cold storage for (eeek!) nearly 25 years. I can't really say whether this is good or bad but certainly the tone - unfinished, smallscale, appealingly brittle - is far more fetching in a month delivering an endless line of all too sterile 'glitch symphonies'.
IAN PENMAN - THE WIRE - OUTER LIMITS - NOVEMBER 2003 There's nobody working with analogue electronic sounds at the moment who's more consistently impressive than Englishman in Wales Dave Handford, aka MOD (and sometimes DJ Methodist, too). Chapel Couture has a wonderfully dusty, grainy, earthy electronic sound. Simple reference points would be a country cousin to Throbbing Gristle's more tuneful moments, or a less self-indulgent version of Coil's looping experiments into analogue synth manipulation. But that doesn't do justice to an album that's as organic and spiritually menacing as a triffid bearing down on you with a maw full of religious pamphlets. Where previous Handford releases have been almost entirely instrumental, Chapel Couture makes brilliant use of the human voice - everything from apposite snippets repeated until your mind opens out into an Escherian vortex (Zeitgeist Whore, Control Mantra), to effects-laden monologues (Delia), to hynotic sci-fi loops (Faraday's Folly). Releases on Dave's Post Office Records are always designed to get collectors salivating. They're packaged in simple, but gorgeous, handmade sleeves and - as John Peel once said of The Fall - they always sound the same, yet always different. This is their best and most commercial release yet. If you're even remotely interested in the arcane, you should hear it. 4/5
DUNCAN BELL - SACKBUT BLUES - FEBRUARY 2004

"Chapel Couture is a masterpiece of it's genre"
MIXING IT - RADIO 3 - FEBRUARY 2004
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