Chal Ravens has written a lovely in-depth review of Still In A Dream at London Review of Books
There's even an LRBplaylist so you can listen as you read
Kieran Press-Reynolds has a really entertaining survey of the stutter in pop and unpop music, from "K-K-K-Katy" to "Melatonin", 1918 to 2026, over at Pitchfork
I feel like there's some stutter and stammer candidates in ardkore, jungle, 2step... also footwork, whose GIF-like properties have been noted...
This is probably my favorite bit of rockpop stuttering - "b-b-b-b-baby you ain't seen n-n-n-n-nothing yet"
Used to love this song as a kid... it seemed sweetly, somehow innocently saucy... now as an all growned-up listener I dig that plaintive bit of lead guitar like a bird circling way way up high in the sky
And somehow, even though you've been here so many times before, you're never prepared for the way that each week feels deader than the one before.
Until finally it's the last week of August and it's like Time's clock has stopped.
Hang on a minute
I have a powerful sensation of deja vu.
A sicky suspicion that I wrote exactly these words last year.
Or was it the year before?
Well, I suppose that only goes to prove my point, in a way.
But this August... this August has felt deader than ever, no-thanks to the relentless stifling heat, discouraging people from doing anything but sit indoors and sweat.
As our sexton Susan said plaintively the other day, mopping perspiration from her brow as she stepped into the rectory: "has the sky forgotten how to rain?".
The footpaths are cracked and dusty. The grass in the meadows is crisp and brown. The trees have that beat-down sun-struck feeling about them. The birds are silent. Blackberries, ripened prematurely, are already at that bloated, fly-blown stage, too sickly to tempt the rare soul on a stroll across the fields.
Indeed there was some debate about whether this newsletter should be called the Harvest Edition on account of the abnormally early harvest.
"We need rain. On parched soil and souls" - so says Evangelical Focus.
It all brings back memories of the long hot summer of 1976 and the unforgettable events of that year.
I'm talking of course about the village fête - the dispute about the whittling contest, the dead-of-night vandalization of the exhibits display, that shocking brawl on the Castle grounds between Ralph Knapp and Patrick Hearn, culminating in the burly pair tumbling into the moat (thankfully almost completely dried out because of the drought).
Memories of another long ago era waft pungently from the first of this season's offerings (dead it might be in the streets and the fields, but musicians and other creative sorts have been busy).
Memories of the early '80s and local musicians like Dramatisand Pride of Passion - late-arriving prog rockers who adapted with surprising agility to the synthpop era (if not in these cases actually making the charts like other musicians who followed a similar arc, such as Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones).
I speak of the new album by The Belbury Poly - Sorcerer, released on the Ghost Box sister-imprint Belbury Music to indicate its divergence from the label's primary soundstream.
Release irrationale:
At the outset of the project, Jim Jupp assembled a palette of instruments and sounds which evoke a moment in musical history when digital studio technology just started to take over from analogue.
Eschewing Belbury Poly’s earlier mid 70s obsessions, to focus on that period around 1983, when artists who could afford it started to experiment with samplers. It was a musical moment dominated by the sounds of Prophet 5, DX7 & PPG synthesizers, Fairlight & Synclavier music computers, TR808 drum machine & Simmons Drums (those ubiquitous hexagonal drum pads) and of course the much-maligned fretless bass.
It’s also an era that’s now seen as something of a golden age for fantasy, sci-fi, comics, book, TV, movies and games (particularly in Britain where it was often fuelled by a post punk reaction to Thatcher’s regime).
In Jupp’s memory these things go hand in hand; as a child his nerdy fandom was soundtracked not as it was for most by Heavy Metal, but by the electronic pop of Bill Nelson, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Japan, and Frank Chickens. Also, by otherworldly TV soundtracks & production music of the era: Elizabeth Parker and Paddy Kingsland at the BBC, The Parry Music Library, Rod Argent’s new age library albums and even Clannad’s Robin of Sherwood score.
Also flashing back to the Eighties is the latest release from Fil OK, the final instalment of his "ecclesiastical electronica" trilogy, released under the alter-ego We're in the Water. It's titled The Dome.
No tasters available as yet but to whet your appetite for the kooky chorale of tracks like "Being Eaten" and the final title track, you can check out the previous installments of this 36 song-cycle: The Belltower and The Steeple
Release irrationale:
2026’s three ambitious works have each interpreted the lyrics and music of his new songs literally as architectural spaces, placing them conceptually in these three grand, holy places of worship, celebration and contemplation. Across the past twelve months this musical trilogy has variously explored different facets of the human experience, and The Dome sees Fil delve deep into the universe of spirituality and what lies within its mysterious realms.
Whereas February’s The Steeple explored the mind - how we think, question, imagine and make sense of the world around us - with June’s second long-player The Belltower turning to the body - the reality of living through relationships, joy, struggle and experience – this autumn’s concluding part The Dome completes the trilogy via an exploration of what nourishes the spirit. It's a record all about connection, hope, resilience, compassion, love, and our capacity to keep growing.
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More squarely in the main soundstream of parish activity, a couple of new publications and a podcast series dedicated to all things spectral.
From Reaktion Books, here's a new tome attempting to take the measure of this thing they call hauntology: Jamie Sexton's The Sounds of Lost Futures: British Musical Hauntology by Jamie Sexton (that's the second appearance of that word in this newsletter, and kind of an eerily apt name for a scholar of hauntology to have, since a sexton's responsibilities include funerals, digging graves and keeping cemeteries tidy).
Release irrationale:
Musical hauntology conjures sounds of futures that never arrived: music that reflects on memory and the recent past, drawing on analogue instrumentation, sampling and digital processing to capture how time feels twisted in an age of endless reproduction. The Sounds of Lost Futures offers the first sustained overview of this influential British mode, tracing its emergence, cognate genres and wide constellation of media influences. It also unpacks the conceptual forces that shape it – from nostalgia and retro culture to fractured temporal experience – while covering key artists and labels such as Ghost Box, The Caretaker and Mordant Music. With a dedicated focus on audiovisual hauntology, this book provides new clarity on a musical form attuned to the strange echoes of modern life.
Unconvinced by that "the first sustained overview" claim - A Year in the Country has put out no less than eleven books on the subject, there was this effort by the splendidly named Merlin Coverley several years ago, I feel like I'm blanking on one or two other books .... Not forgetting some jottings by yours truly and the Reverend Fisher. So I would say the soil is well tilled at this point.
Also, “cognate genres”!
A slightly stale air also clings to this non-nonfiction publication: the anthologyBrutalist Ghost Stories.
You simultaneously think "why did no one think of this before?" and "surely someone already did this?"
From Confingo Publishing, a release irrationale:
‘We live among ruins, surrounded by places built for a future that never arrived.’
Brutalist Ghost Stories is an anthology of seventeen original stories inspired by Britain's brutalist buildings and landscapes.
From grand libraries and university buildings to service stations and closed down car parks, this collection explores the concrete structures which have in their own way shaped Britain and imagines what dwells in them.
Traversing Scotland through to the south coast of England, these stories explore haunting, memory, folklore, loss and the uncanny.
Familiar landmarks become sites of mystery, overlooked corners of our nation's built environment reveal hidden histories and strange encounters abound.
Why no story about our local carbuncle, Tonwell Tower?
Clearly this whole field remains a growth area. Viz, the Institute's launch of a special unit, Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group
Ghost stories are in fact one of its subjects of interest:
We can glimpse the gleanings of these researchers through their regular Hauntology Podcast, as amiable and indoor-voice intimate as you'd expect from such a gathering of scholarly kith. It's available via Rephonic, Apple, and other places you might expect, with transcripts offered as well as the audio. Three episodes in, topics include "Spectral Tourism" and "Haunted Writing, Creative Non-Fiction and the Moors Murderers".
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Returning to recent musical emanations...
Well, what a pleasant surprise - a new late-summer release from Moon Wiring Club, an artist I generally associate with the cold, damp weeks leading up to Christmas.
Almost Alive At Morgans Laneis one of Ian Hodgson's irregular delves into auto-archaeology, with a twist: these are not unreleased tracks and alternate takes but live performances, or residues thereof, that have been assembled into a kind of phantasmagoric "live album" that never quite was.
The album is out in a few days time and although a download-only release, it can be acquired in a special package: a "bespoke chunky presentation envelope" containing sundry goodies such as an A6 kineograph "overlaid with fragmented 1985 Microcomputer Soft Command Hallucinations" (yes your guess is as good mine), 8 exclusive postcards, and 4 (out of a range of 40) Curious Quartet Artcards. There are also some other related and semi-related goodies separately available - an Almost Alive Sticker Selection, issue #3 of Catmask , feline greetment cards- but also buyable as a bundle.
Release irrationale:
ALMOST ALIVE AT MORGANS LANE (GEpH020DLX) is quite possibly the cumulative meisterwerk of MWCs ongoing audio reclamation mission / divine calling to conjure up and deftly assemble as much esoteric ODDNUSS inside the most closely packed, yet luxuriously stacked envelope as possible.
Many moons ago, MWC were coaxed from their ephemeral Northern compound by a variety of elegant individuals and highly professional organisations to lucratively perform aLIVE undertaking within a fascinating variety of fashionably showbiz, yet simultaneously clandestine locations throughout the country.
Naturally these MWC performances were instantly and uniformly proclaimed a MASSIVE SUCCESS and soon became the highly sort-after ticket of the season, spoken of with whispered awe and a wide-eyed reverence.
Who amongst us can ever forget the amusing MWC catchphrase quotations ‘In the Phonebook Under Gas’ or ‘On the Never Never’ that artfully proliferated as a welcome secret fever throughout the en vogue vocabulary of the contemporaneous socialite elite.
Now YOU, who understandably were :
denied entrance
unable to locate the supposed venue
not yet sentient
choosing instead to rewatch repeats of Lovejoy
erroneously duped by pernicious rumours viciously perpetrated by the stealth agents of our envious rivals into avoidance
flamboyantly overdosed on Opium derivatives during the proceedings
Can rectify this catastrophic oversight + finally fully submit to Hexperience MWC ALMOST ALIVE AT MORGANS LANE with this highly stylish and unique bespoke chunky presentation envelope ~ jam-packed with HAND-ASSEMBLED interactive mnemonic articles all adeptly infused with occult significance potentiality.
8 tracks of unreleased MWC Musick(e) have been assiduously exhumed and thoughtfully re-spliced from an arcane assimilation-jumble transfer of aLIVE locationals, sound-bored recordings, reassembled rehearsal footage, in situ bootlegs, digital camera memory cards + patented MWC test recovery CDR Disc Rot Technique.
An undeniable RUFFness alongside an omnipresent atmosphere of uncanny malevolence eerily permeate these recordings, which feature aLIVE baked-in beat loopery elaborately juggled with copious quantities of unmoored vocal exclamations, percolated with corroded roomtone reverberations and myriad splintering aberrative atmospheric fluctuations.
Familiar MWC favourites such as Doll Hill House & Tudorbethan Jobbernowl now feature mutating situation deformities, alongside never repeated MWC obscurities such as the distorted machinations of Black Pudding Jacking Zone and the sublime Seance Psychedelia offering Sherry at the Ritz ~ all considerately rescued from the Vault ov ‘Orror by dedicated + discerning MWC archivists for the eternal delectation of future generations.
The resulting 55 minute opus provides a definitive aural totality of what undeniably conceivably occurred when MWC manifested one last time and performed their infamous Psychotopographical Swansong
And it's another splendid splodge of oozy-woozy oddnuss... simultaneously disintegrative and driving (the show must go on even if chunks of flesh are flaking off the performers)..... schmears of scrambled sound veer out of the foggy mix like a drunkenly jeering stranger... melody-riffs and refrains naggingly familiar from the MWC songbook return in distended form like hall-of-mirrors reflections of friend-faces... Top tune: the tauntingly jaunty "Tudorbethan Jobbernowl (Ergotoxicosis Mix)".
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Sunday school director Dave Howell informs me that the new record by Lawrence English, who hails from our Australian twin town Woolloongabba, is definitely on the vibe: sonically "somewhere between Vangelis and The Caretaker" and carrying a polemic about "the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures."
English's release irrationale refers to a term he's coined, "Acid Nostalgia... a shorthand to describe the de-contouring of the future through a corrosive fixation on a flattened rendering of the preceding times... a certain type of lazy cultural scripting where tropes of the past are presented in the absolute, as empty pictorials; photocopies without any original from which to draw actual meaning, or useful detail."
The album's title is certainly bang on theme: The Rest Is My Ghost.
Mr. Howell incidentally directs us to a new track by Ukrainian exchange student Regina Collage that if not exactly haunty does waft off halcyon echoes of A.R. Kane - "It Should Be Something".
Gorgeous stuff, definite "Up!" vibrations.... From the album Horizont. It's on Jabu's label do you have peace?
(Jabu themselves return shortly with a wonderfully atmospheric and spacey-sounding EP, Severn Flood Plain / Where You Run To on Mr. Howell's label Six of Swords)
It pops up in the cover story on Space Afrika, whose new albumQuiet Storm is out at the end of September.
And it pops up again in the lead review for an artist unfamiliar to me: Conflux Coldwell. The album is called Echolalia and it explores the connections between hauntology and autism.
Release irrationale:
"There is a spectre haunting Conflux Coldwell, the spectre of autism."
Bulletdodge is proud to announce the release of Echolalia a striking new electronica album from Conflux Coldwell. Arriving digitally this June, with a vinyl edition to follow in early September, the album Echolalia explores the notion of internal “ghosts” — the lingering traces that inhabit the mind. Sparked by his daughter’s autism diagnosis earlier this year, and his sister’s AuDHD diagnosis the year before, Coldwell was prompted to reflect on his own neurodivergence. The result is a deeply personal and introspective work that interrogates how these experiences have shaped his creative process, his unique perception of the world, and his enduring fascination with machines and hauntology.
Also lead reviewed in that same issue of The Wire is a record that truly can only be described as bringing-up-the-rear when it come to its subject: the spookiness of children's TV of the British 1960s and 1970s: Luke Haines's Izzy Wizzy Let's Get Busy.
"By the 1960s and 70s magick was all over children's television in the UK..."
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Not precisely hauntological but hailing from our Canadian twin town of Port Moody, Realm of Dusk - the new-ish alias of Sam Macklin - have recently put out a third album of spacey glitchscapes. It's titled, logically enough, III and is released on the evocatively named imprint Blasted Gorse.
If a title like "Astral Vomit" suggests a secret and hitherto unexpected arsequake influence, others such as "Bill Evans" and "Solitude Seekers" more closely evoke the atmosphere. Indeed Matthew Ingram, reviewing at Woebot, uses words like "pensive" and "sidereal" and "funereal". Which last does sound a wee bit haunty.
Another elder of the parish swings by with news of an Extended Play.
Kollidaskope is a hot slab of Ekoplekz homing - or honing - in with laser-precise focus on the exact set of sounds that tickle his audio-erogenous zones. Sensibility refinement as a lifetime's project.
So the opening title track is Rastakraut fastskank, like a dried-up Monolake. Dank 'n' bouncy, "Refrakzion" is like "dub techno" if it meant something completely different. "Dubnauzium" finds the sour spot between "Silent Command" and "The Gospel Comes to New Guinea". "Autoekpression" is Bandalu chasing "Bitches Brew" down a long dark tunnel.
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Overtaken by meteorological events! In between starting the Newsletter last weekend and finishing up this morning, well, the sky remembered how to rain. Susan, the sexton, popped by the rectory on her way back from the shops - her face streaming with moisture, only this time precipitation not perspiration. Drenched to the skin she was and shivering, thanks to the sudden cataclysmic downpour and temperature drop. Dripping all over the freshly waxed parquet flooring.
Answering the prayers of farmers and gardeners alike, the heavens have finally opened up.
Far be it from me to encourage you to buy any other book this summer, but I feel obliged to draw your attention to a flurry of notable books, made by mates, that have come out recently or are about to come out...
For instance, here's the latest from an old friend from down under, Anwen Crawford - a critical study of the film Morvern Callar that comes in this daintily designed and pleasingly petite edition by Fireflies Press.
I was glad to offer this endorsement:
There is a film called Morvern Callar and a novel
called Morvern Callar. Now a critical study called Morven Callar
joins them as an equal. Anwen Crawford’s writing is as tactile, agile and alert
as Lynne Ramsay's direction, Alwin H. Küchler’s camera, Samantha Morton's
performance. She pushes always for the startling thought, the tartly troubling
image. Great critics make compelling work even more compelling than it already
is and this is what Crawford achieves here, as she always does."
Anwen’s monograph made me watch the film again.
From the publisher:
In the 2002 volume of the Decadent Editions, Anwen Crawford delves into Lynne Ramsay’s haunting second feature Morvern Callar, adapted from Alan Warner’s novel, to craft a fiercely lucid and poetic exploration of grief, class, women’s authorship and the place of art in our world today.
Another mate of long vintage is Sean Nye, professor at USC Thornton School of Music and scholar of electronic dance music.
Here is his long-time-a-comin' masterwork on the Teutonic / technotronic interface, The Music-Machines, via Oxford University Press.
For which I was pleased to offer this blurb:
“The Music-Machines works first as a richly researched and wide-ranging material history tracking the transmissions and transmigrations of German electronic innovations across American popular culture over the last half-century. But even more fascinating is Sean Nye’s exploration of how certain ideas about “Germany” and "the Germanic" have been a spur to the creative imagination. These myths and stereotypes about “Teutonic” traits (discipline, a talent for engineering, a steely and chilly posthuman precision) resulted in a kind of exoticism of Mittel Europa, a syndrome that has proved to be particularly seductive and generative for Black American musical subcultures. Teeming with sharp perceptions, fresh discoveries, surprising connections, and amusing details, The Music-Machines is as entertaining as it is intellectually probing.”
Sprockets is actually written about in the book!
What the publisher says:
In The Music-Machines, author Sean Nye traces a fascinating and distinctly American interpretation of 20th century German electronic music . Covering a series of crucial historical moments, Nye provides both a new and alternate history of the extraordinary impact that electronic music from Germany had in the United States, including the receptions of elektronsische Musik, Krautrock, goth-industrial, Eurodance, techno, trance, and minimal.
This first comprehensive history of German-American exchanges in electronic music explores the political and social dimensions of American constructions of Germanness in electronic music. Nye interprets the music in relation to technology, art, and musical style, encouraging readers to delve into what that reveals about its relationship to nation, race, gender, and sexuality. Through such interpretations, The Music-Machines presents a cultural arc of these constructions of Germanness and electronic music.
Nye sets this German-American exchange within larger questions of music and transnationalism, tracing key intersections between German and US cultures while also reflecting on other musical and cultural influences on German electronic music, The Music-Machines also places the evolution of electronic music in its broader historical context, demonstrating the ultimate intertwining of America's popular music with the Cold War history of West Germany and the post-1989 history of the Berlin Republic. In this way, The Music-Machinessets the frame not only for the study of German electronic music, but the ways in which this electronic turn emerged in American perceptions of German identity
From Oxford University Press to Cambridge University Press... And another dance-music scholar I've known for decades: Hillegonda C. Rietveld, whose friends call her Gonnie and who some will know as a former member of Quando Quango.
Gonnie recently published a book co-edited with Toby Young (no, not that Toby Young), The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Dance Music.
I have not seen inside it but it looks to be a meaty and essential read - one I should really get hold of as I embark upon teaching a new course this coming semester, Studies in Electronic Music.
What the publisher says:
Electronic dance music is increasingly the focus of a multitude of academic research projects around the world but has been drastically under-represented in accessible core published material. This innovative scholarly collection provides an important 'first stop' for researchers and students wishing to work in this area. It examines the key features of numerous electronic dance music scenes and (sub)genres alongside discussions of the musical, social and aesthetic experiences of participants to consider how these musical practices create purpose and cultural significance for millions around the world. At the same time, it introduces diverse theoretical approaches to the understanding of electronic dance music cultures and addresses the issues and debates in electronic dance music culture studies. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawn from both music and cultural studies – including music aesthetics, technologies, venues, and performativity – from a broad geographical perspective, the volume sheds fresh light on electronic dance music cultures.
A more recently acquired friend is Kevin Dettmar, a professor at Pomona College and author of books like the fascinatingIs Rock Dead? and his monograph on Gang of Four's Entertainment!, amongst others.
Now Kev comes with a memoir-tinged celebration of punk and New Wave's greatest recordings, Punk In 50 Pieces.
For which I offered this endorsement:
"You think you know all about punk? Kevin Dettmar shows how much there is still to discover about the music and its era. Crackling with startling ideas and unexpected insights, juiced with surprising stories and unknown connections, Punk in 50 Pieces is a sustained feat of zoomed-in listening and zoomed-out contextualizing. As fast and fun as a Buzzcocks singles compilation, this book vaults to the top shelf in the Punk Lit pantheon."
This is a very entertaining read, breathing fresh life into an overtold story. You’ll reach out to imaginary-high-five the author when he strikes a righteous chord (NY Dolls, Adverts in my case) and relish even more squabbling with him in your head when he doesn't.
Come squabble with us on September 13, when Kevin and I will be chatting Punk In 50 Pieces at Book Soup in Los Angeles. The time is 3pm.
The book is out now on HarperCollins
Finally, someone I have known since he was in Hugo Largo, a band who figure in Still In A Dream just as they did in the late Eighties pages of Melody Maker (Joy in fact was the person who first introduced them to those pages).
Before he formed Hugo Largo, Tim Sommer was involved in various bands (including Swans, for just a moment, very early on) but he was primarily a champion of other people's music, via his roles as radio presenter (hosting Noise the Show, on WNYU) and as a prolific music journalist writing for Sounds, Village Voice and Trouser Press (the latter from the age of 16!). And it is Trouser Press Books who have just published his collection of music writings, drawn from 1979 right up to almost the present: Dispatches from the Kingdom of Outsiders.
This is another book that's great to argue with - Tim will take a combative stance on some contentious issue or other (Sha Na Na as the most important band at Woodstock, Sandinista! as a worthless mess), often starting the piece with a throwdown first line ("R.E.M. were the American Sex Pistols". "There is only one Bob Dylan. And the other one is Mark E. Smith"). Along with the argumentation, there are memoiristic vignettes about his involvements with NYC figures like Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth, real-time eyewitness reports on things like the PiL-incited riot at the Ritz in 1981, interviews, and a lot of pieces about The Beatles. It's a fun book for dipping into it.
Another string to Tim's bow - presenter on the alternative music show Post-Modern MTV
He then went on to work for VH1, and then A&R at Atlantic...
