Hauntology Parish Newsletter: Exchange Student Program

Here's a cool side-project by two members of the hauntology-aligned Ghost Box groop Beautify Junkards - João Branco Kyron and Tony Watts  aka Hidden Horse. 

Here's what I said of the new album Incorporeal, which is out now in vinyl and digital editions on Holuzam:

“A startling step sideways from Beautify Junkyards’s sweetly spooky psychedelia, this parallel project brings the New Sonic Architecture of Eighties electronica into the 21^st Century. Spacious and eerie, these glistening vistas bear comparison with Cabaret Voltaire, Chris & Cosey, and The Tear Garden, as well as moodscape artists like Burial and Actress. Unmissable.”

Jim Jupp also chips in: 

"A journey through odd spaces and echoing caverns, powered along by angular rhythms and hypnotic sequencers. An electronic, motorik tapestry that feels both industrial and organic - like a dystopian Harmonia. Utterly beguiling!"

You can buy it via Norman Records, Juno, or Boomkat. 

Here's a track from Hidden Horse's first album Opala 

RIP Richard Davis

The heartbeat of Astral Weeks - and effectively the band-leader.

Another of a number of other career highlights

And another

thrills versus landfill

Kieran Press-Reynolds on how "the recent explosion of remixing — from sped-up edits and nu-SoundClown mashups to fanmade bootlegs — is rewiring the way we create and consume music in both thrilling and unnerving ways". At No Bells blogzine.

Upside: 

"It’s hard to deny the wild thrill of tempo-twisted remixes, and it’s cool to see them gain wider appreciation. The appeal of shifting the speed up is the way it gives a song a pleasurably tickly feeling, or injects the vocalist with a burst of frantic energy. Lowering it can give music a dirge-like melancholy and a cinematic main-character tint. Add reverb to the slowness and you have a perfect recipe for vaporous psychedelia. At best, these remixes are helping explode the genre conventions that prevail in radio-ready music. Popular indie country is being remade into gloriously deranged flutters of squeaks; Mainstream R&B and pop are combusting into inhuman blazes of twitchy yearning." 

Downside: 

"There’s an empty, formulaic quality to some of these mashups, where they feel like bait engineered for viral traction. I can see a future where labels hire mashup makers to produce in-house SoundClowns... So many mashups are low-effort, and the heap of fast/slow remixes and other online styles... forms something like a giant musical landfill, the cultural equivalent of a black hole, into which we’re pouring all our attention and killed time."