By The Intrepid in Sounds — 23 Sep 2026

Chain Home Low

Dunwich photo by Mike Babb.

Mike Babb and I go way back in the world of teeny tiny independent bands and record labels that released 7" singles (and the occasional compact disc when budgets permitted) once upon a time in the 1990's.

We had CD and vinyl collections, MP3 audio compression was crawling out of the primordial digital soup, hard drives and RAM on home computers would be dwarfed by budget mobile devices of today, and streaming wasn't even a dream. A few hundred 45 RPM singles could pressed for an equivalent number of dollars, and if you or your friends had a multitrack cassette recorder, then studio time was essentially zero (and the music sounded like it, too).

While producing these little releases, we learned a lot about lead times, supply chains, distribution, and project management without ever calling them by those terms. Some of us even got "hipster famous," which sounds snarky, but isn't meant to. This was a microcosm where selling an entire pressing of 500 copies was a monumental achievement, tours were maybe a few shows out of town, and making money was such an improbability as to be a mild joke.

With that said, Mike exemplifies the energy, good will, discernment, and generosity that got these records pressed and in the hands of people who still treasure them today. The Cat's Miaow and Hydroplane are two tightly coupled bands from Australia that had a number of releases on Mike's labels, and they've recently enjoyed a rediscovery via London's World Of Echo label (The Cat's Miaow also have their debut album coming out shortly).

My origin story with Mike starts with an out-of-the-blue email (via AOL, naturally) in 1994 with just two words in the body: "Start writing." It coincided with a college friend who was traveling to Houston from Ann Arbor for a weekend visit during which she was going to record bass parts for a couple of songs I'd written. Those two tracks became a 7" on Mike's Quiddity label, and that's where the story starts.

Mike recently started exploring the realm of modular analog synthesizers, a voltage-controlled sonic LEGO set with cables and knobs that look like old school mad scientist gear. And he started sending me snippets of things he created with the equipment, noting that a key feature of modular synths is that they don't have a "save" button. Once you power down the rack, unplug the cables, and set the knobs back, whatever you had going... is gone. Poof. Ephemeral. Kinda radical to someone like me who's been working with digital audio workstations (DAWs) with undo histories going back to the Cambrian Explosion.

Since March of this year, we've created over a dozen little compositions, rooted in retro electronics, but varying in style from "kosmische" synth excursions to upbeat funk grooves to industrial-adjacent soundtracks. There's no brand vision, marketing plan, release schedule, and absolutely zero generative AI involved. Not because of some purist, "touch grass" reaction, but doing something simply for the joy of making things.

And the name? Chain Home Low is the code name for the updated British early warning radar system of World War II. Mike lives near one of the many installation sites, Dunwich, Suffolk. The New Zealand indie legends The Bats also have a song with that title, so it's not all hush-hush militaria.

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