Peter Fitzpatrick has spent two decades as Circuit3, making melodic, retro-futurist synthpop indebted to Kraftwerk, Eno and the early Human League. Metanoia: Music From Therapy breaks from that pattern. Eight largely wordless instrumentals, built on a conversation about trauma, closing with an eleven-minute duet with Vince Clarke – it must be a Mortality Tables product.
The idea started in a pub. Fitzpatrick and Mortality Tables founder Mat Smith fell into a long conversation about therapy after Clarke’s 2023 Songs of Silence show in London, over drinks at The Hope in Spitalfields. Smith had been nursing the concept but hadn’t found the right collaborator. Fitzpatrick, already drifting from pop songwriting toward soundscape, turned out to be a good fit.
There’s no linear arc to the tracks. The sequencing follows how memory actually surfaces in therapy – non-chronological, recursive, occasionally contradictory. “Cracked Eyes” opens the record against a Pat Ingoldsby poem. “Mood,” “Imperfect” and “Burnout” read like session notes. “Where Are We Going?” breaks the analogue palette for acoustic piano – a small but pointed concession to the emotional weight of the moment. “Shielding From The Past” and “What If Everything Goes Right?” close out the body of the record before the long finale.
Fitzpatrick has framed the shift as a move away from his “melodic synthpop background” toward “expressive analogue electronic instrumentals”, and the album holds to that. There is an economy in the material that long-time fans will find moves away from the grid and is more expansive.
Clarke’s direct connection to Mortality Tables goes back to the label’s early days, when he supplied a musical response to Smith’s spoken-word piece, “On Mortality, Immortality & Charles Ives,” recorded in Gareth Jones’ studio. “The Hope” is a different thing altogether. At eleven minutes, it dwarfs everything preceding it. Fitzpatrick calls it, “a melodic drone landscape that holds both hopelessness and hope at the same time,” which is about right.
Two analogue-synth lifers building something slow and harmonically patient, where neither pole cancels the other. Don’t expect an Erasure cameo here, nor pop hooks borrowed for weight. For anyone who came to Circuit3 by way of Yazoo or Erasure, the pairing lands.