Taking a Record for a Run: Rival Consoles - Landscape from Memory

Breathable spaces and lush green corridors on a figure of 8 route.

Jul 10, 2025

I’ve written a couple of pieces over the last year about my relationship to running and music.

‘How the Landscape Feels (with Music)’, from last July, tried to capture thoughts I had about the places I ran through, and to think about what role sound played in that. As I mentioned then, I didn’t wear earphones while running, wanting instead to tune in to ‘music that’s already inside my head, music coming from an inner jukebox, sometimes as if from nowhere, sometimes prompted by a thought or a feeling or overhearing a word or phrase’.

I returned to this theme recently in ‘Run. Listen. Repeat’. That piece started out as a review of Ben Ratliff’s recent book Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening, but became as much about my thoughts on running and sound. As I mentioned at the end, I’d just been gifted a pair of running headphones and was looking forward to seeing what changes that brought to my running.

My first runs with planned soundtracks used music I was already familiar with. I’ll write about that another time; basically, there was an album I always knew would be my first choice if I made the switch, and it proved to be as magnificent for running as I’d expected.

This week I decided to run with music that was new to me. I’m glad I did. Not only was the album I chose a great running soundtrack, it also gave me the idea for this post, which may be the start of a new series where I take records for a run to review them. The idea would be to attend to the music as it soundtracks a particular run and to think about some connections between sound, running, landscape, writing and whatever else emerges. Similar to what Ratliff does in his book, but making it my thing.

London-based producer Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, has released two albums in close succession this year. In June, there was the video game score for MindsEye, followed by the 4 July release of Landscape without Memory. On a recent trial of Qobuz, I’d flagged two of the tracks from MindsEye when I saw them recommended. I’d been aware of Rival Consoles before, but I hadn’t followed West’s releases closely. The MindsEye tracks immediately connected. When Qobuz listed Landscape from Memory as a featured release last week, I added it to my library. And so it became the first album of new music I loaded to my phone as a running soundtrack.

For my run on Sunday 6 July, I chose a 10K route I’d recently started using, a twisted figure of 8 that covers paved waggonways between Longbenton and High Heaton, rougher footpaths between the railway line and the NUFC training grounds, the quickly growing area of the new Autumn Ford housing estate in Benton, a stretch of Wiltshire Drive, and a leafy footpath that leads back to the railway line.

Landscape and memory are favourite themes of mine, especially when I’m on the move. I was therefore drawn to the title of the Rival Consoles album, though it wasn’t the reason I selected it for my run. I chose it because I expected its wordless, synth-based music would provide a motivational soundtrack. And so it proved.

I hadn’t researched the album or listened to it before taking it out on the waggonways. I just pressed play and went. I didn’t note titles until the sixth track. ‘Coda’ gave me pause as its woozy, disorienting intro threatened to mess with my running pace. The previous tracks had seemed to flow smoothly, a mixture of synth sketches and budding beats that locked into my cadence. They did what I’d hoped they would do, made me one with the music and my movement through the landscape.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t notice what was happening in them. Flowy as they are, the earlier tracks got me thinking about moving bodies creating temporary shapes on dance floors, machine tools honing edges or smoothing curves, a metallic keening here ceding earphone space to squelchy puddles of sound there.

I thought of many things I’ve felt before when responding to synth-based electronic music, and which I’ve sometimes criticised myself and other writers for leaning too much into: metaphors of organicism, plant life, aquatic themes, journeys through imaginary places. I’ve decided to not be so hard on us writers for thinking of these kinds of imagery. They are what they are, and this is an album about landscape and memory.

I took the album for a second run on Tuesday 8 July. On this occasion, I started it a bit later into the run as I was with my wife for the first 2.5K. This meant I heard different tracks at different points, which made for a nice contrast with Sunday’s run. This time around I picked up on earlier moments of dissonance than I’d previously noticed, the opening bars of ‘Soft Gradient Beckons’ being one example. Here, harsh sounds saw at each other as a backwash of sound enters and percussive rhythm builds. Momentum established, the track enters a lull two thirds of the way through and the dominant sound becomes an insistent beep. I thought of hospital monitors and the nagging/reassuring electronic pulse in Explosions in the Sky’s ‘First Breath After Coma’.

Again, I’ve previously chastised myself and others for relying on comparisons with other artists when reviewing. Again, I’ve decided to forgive us this indulgence. Translation and comparison are how we make sense of the world, negotiating the new via the familiar, looking for common ways of understanding each other.

On the evening of 8 July, I attended a listening party for the album hosted by Erased Tapes (West’s label) on Bandcamp. West was present to offer insights into tracks and respond to questions. That issue of translation/comparison came up frequently, with listeners noting how certain tracks reminded them of other artists. West joined in, citing Burial and Daniel Lopatin/Oneohtrix Point Never as influences.

Many listeners mentioned space, breathing and flow as key elements they were picking up from Landscape without Memory. I agree. I was drawn into the music by its fine balance of tentative exploration, breathing space, forward momentum and echo. Some sounds enter the mix as if looking for their footing, to then fade away or gain the confidence to become dominant elements.

When running, I’d felt the spaces between the layers of sound, noticing how West doesn’t just ramp things up but lets his songs breathe.

This is probably the place to point out that I’m using bone conduction headphones, meaning my ears are uncovered and I therefore have further layers of sound while I’m running: footsteps, traffic, bicycles approaching from behind.

The most obvious extra layer on my runs is the near-constant birdsong. There is ample space in Rival Consoles’ music to allow those sounds to become an ingredient, and I couldn’t always be sure whether what I was hearing was in the exterior landscape or in the music. That’s especially the case when you have a track titled ‘Gaivotas’ (‘seagulls’ in Portuguese).

During the listening party, West mentioned his technique of reversing previously used musical elements, glitching and slowing while reversing to create warped reiterations. Fragments of melody become timbres and textures.

I get a sense of an ecosystem, each element affecting the others.

Is a landscape from memory a space of constant becoming? Not knowing, I ran on, revelling in the woozy glitches of ‘Jupiter’ that made me question my direction and pace, grateful for the relative unidirectionality of following track ‘In a Trance’ as it provided the impetus I needed for the later stages of the run.

Landscape from Memory is 58 minutes long, the ideal time for a 10K at my pace. That was pure coincidence the first time I took it out, but now I know for future runs and can plan accordingly.

As for the physical landscape I ran though this week, it’s much as it was when I wrote about it last July: ragwort abounding, nettles looming from hedges, the barren footpaths of winter turned to lush green corridors.

I remember it from last year because I took note while running through, because it reached out to me, because I heard it and wrote about it. So much of the landscape we find in writing is drawn from memory. I suppose the same applies for music.

A couple of videos, not related to my run/review but providing more information about the album and other art it connects to.

The first one doubles as a video for Rival Consoles’ ‘Soft Gradient Beckons’ (track 4 of Landscape from Memory) and a documentary about the artist behind the animation, Anthony Dickenson. There are some nice parallels between visual and sonic art here.

Those parallels come through in this ‘making of’ video about the album. West describes the influence of place on his work, as Dickenson does in the video above. They share an interest in bringing collages of work sketched out in different spaces to a final space where it all comes together. West talks of making music ‘like making brush marks on a canvas’.

Songs and Objects

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