Charting the career of Epic Soundtracks (bka Kevin Paul Godfrey) is to a certain extent to follow the trajectory of independent music in the UK from the seventies’ on forwards.

In 1972, Soundtracks along with his brother who would shortly take the name Nikki Sudden embarked on a project that would result in the Swell Maps. Prior it all coming down to that, though, the assembled players went and backed up a guy named Steve Treatment.

Recording a few singles in that configuration, the band, now well versed in souped up rock tropes, moved to record some of its own work. Using the Treatment sessions as a touchstone, the Swell Maps engendered a shift towards noisome experiments and mirrored some tendencies of the no wave thing going on over in New Yawk.

With that group lasting only a few years until the dawning of the eighties, Soundtracks found himself looking for more folks to cut music with. Eventually, reunited with a former Swell Map, the duo issued a single before Soundtracks was asked to join a line-up of Crime and the City Solution, which boasted members for the recently disbanded Birthday Party.

Of course, none of what preceded Soundtrack’s foray into a solo recording career could have hinted at what the nineties would sound like for the pianist and song writer. Over the course of his career, Soundtracks had largely been engaged with rock styled outfits, never giving over to the more fey tendencies that went along with his T-Rex fixation from back at the beginning of his career.

Either way, with two decades of recording behind him, it wasn’t difficult for Soundtracks to enlist various well respected players from the underground scene in England and abroad – he even snagged the Sonic Youth dudes for a bit.

His properly released albums might have still had at least a bit of a rock influence to it – not overt, mind you. But his posthumously issued Debris comprises mostly piano ballads and a few extraordinarily adventurous instrumentals.

Debris’ vocal cuts all come off as somber, but in Soundtrack’s monotone crooning, there’s a dash of exhilaration as its clear the singer was able to release whatever pent up juju he had in him. Again, though, it’d be the moments where it was all instrumental work that the album comes alive – like a soundtrack to a creepy children’s movie.

“Wild and Smiling” is at once sedate and completely tripped out. With it’s shimmering few piano chords repeating in an endless succession, the supplemental guitar skronk and tossed off odd noises engender a paranoid wonderland that might only have been fully realized within Soundtrack’s own mind. Much the same sensation flies from “A Three Acre Floor,” which does come off as a bit less paranoid and more hopeful, if not in a dramatically restrained manner.

Nothing, though, really matches the oddity that is Soundtrack’s “The Persuader.” Incorporating some Erik Satie slowness and repetition in there, the song sports a memorable melody, if not a complex one. But whatever the case is, there’s no way that fans of Soundtrack’s other work aren’t going to be drawn in by the wide eyed simplicity of this all. Cop it well.