Simon Fisher Turner's debut release for fellow avant-ambient hoofer Scanner's Sulfur label imagines a journey. The album title refers to a now-irrelevant ticketing system that the British railway system introduced in the '80s to persuade travelers to leave their cars in their garages and let the train take the strain. Ever since the last conservative government enacted legislation to privatize the formerly publicly held British Rail, the only strain around can be clearly seen on the faces of harassed, embittered passengers.

The train carriages are as plastic as an $8,000 Kia coupe deluxe, and the rails themselves are so cracked and ill-maintained that derailments occur with grisly regularities. Britons have wholly taken to heart the hackneyed Maine statement of graceless fact, "You can't get there from here." Britain is, from a mass transit point of view, fucked. And though Simon Fisher Turner probably didn't have this disgraceful collapse in mind while working on Travelcard, it certainly provides a gripping irony.

"Hole Entry" begins with the sounds of rolling locomotive stock before ramping up into a Scannerly textured, but prolonged groove. "Phote" is more daring, beginning as a Jack Dangers thump-a-thon, augmented by delicate harp plinks and snugglesome ambient pads. It's unashamedly 1994 and exists as though Kid 606 and V/VM had never ripped this too-familiar rulebook to shreds. Turner is, by the way, a dab hand at this cinematic stuff-- he provided much musical melancholia for the late, great British film director, Derek Jarman; his sparse score for Blue defines the adjective "elegiac."

"Slope" briefly visits the vibraphone Venus jazz that many electronic folks get caught up in. Shrewdly, Turner leaves Venus for the glockenspiel music of a child's playpen as a subtle comment on oh-so freaky space jam jazz. Rephlex artists, you have been skewered! After the nostalgia trip of "Twice Two" (once again, Turner displays his affection for the early years of IDM), "Guitar Pule" steps Eno-ishly into yet another lush sound environment. "Close" approximates the Balearic vibes that abounded on Creation's 1991 compilation, Keeping the Faith. But now that Balearic has come to mean "shit off your shoe trance wank," I caution anyone from engaging in any suspiciously Mediterranean behaviors until long after White Marsh, M.D. has become synonymous with clubland hedonism and terpsichorean excess.

By this point, Turner has done nothing to suggest that Travelcard belongs in your collection. He's adapted themes and styles that many others have successfully exhausted. "Filter" might be considered somewhat au courant, with its jungle-styled but minus-eighted beats and tinge of techstep paranoia, but it's a single voice where I'd appreciate a panoply of discord.

Though it pains me to be honest about this release, I cannot hide my disappointment. Turner's 1997 release, Shwarma, deftly incorporated found sounds, field recordings, and a traveler's ear for uniqueness and locale. But here, Turner has allowed his talents and attention to lapse into serviceability and indifference. Not as woeful as British Rail, mind, but a strain all the same.

-Paul Cooper