Circuit3’s Metanoia Turns Therapy Notes Into Eight Analogue Rooms

Circuit3 has always been a song project. Across a decade and releases from 2015’s siliconchipsuperstar through 2022’s Technology For The Youth, Peter Fitzpatrick built a recognizable language out of analogue synthesizers, melodic synthpop memory and a persistent interest in the late Seventies and early Eighties, when machines still seemed to promise something. Metanoia: Music From Therapy, out on Mortality Tables, removes most of that scaffolding. The voice nearly disappears. The pop structure dissolves. What is left is sound, space and duration.

The record’s origin explains the shift. On 17 November 2023, Fitzpatrick and Mat Smith, who runs Mortality Tables, attended Vince Clarke’s first solo concert in London, a show built around Songs Of Silence. Afterwards they walked through the rain looking for somewhere to stop and ended up in The Hope, a pub opposite Smithfield Market. They talked for a long time about therapy, difficult relationships, trauma and mental health. Smith had spent eighteen months writing down phrases after his own sessions. Read back together, the notes started to resemble song titles.

The word metanoia describes a change of perspective arrived at through acceptance. Fitzpatrick’s response was to abandon narration almost entirely, turning the personal material into frequency, pressure and silence rather than language. Eight tracks are arranged as interlocking rooms, each with its own temperature. “Cracked Eyes” opens the record with fragile, discreet layers, synthesizers that seem to breathe instead of advancing, its title reaching back to childhood and to Pat Ingoldsby’s poem of the same name.

This is not an album that explains itself. It processes, and the processing is audible in the restraint.