summery emissions from the Blank Workshop

"After a prolonged period of wandering off, the sun this year has never been more actively malevolent. Seventeen notable cities have evaporated, and numerous picnics have been slightly postponed due to an overwhelming demand for decorative parasols. Simply the perfect time for Gecophonic to release Down to the Silver Sea, a special compendium on a glittering new sub-label ~ Gecophonic Audio System Productions. GASP!


"GASP!01LP almost certainly has the potential to accompany all of your extensive Summertime activities. Whether flower-pressing in the garden, hallucinating in the summerhouse, fainting inside stifling sites of historical interest, pirouetting along the promenade, or even sea-cruise thalassophobia complications, barely a moment will pass that isn't made all the sweeter by obsessively listening to Down to the Silver Sea. 

"Naturally, Gecophonic favourites, the Moon Wiring Club, feature on this Summer Special LP, providing enchanting melodies and foot-flapping rhythms that ensure a familiarity of confusion to sooth the fervid attentions of their kindly listeners. Joining them on Down to the Silver Sea are a magical gaggle of talented musicians, each flourishing a trio of delightful compositions that thematically compliment each other in a varied seasonal bouquet of charming sound!"

Available 33/07/1923 !

Initial concept of Mr Hodgson's was apparently the musical equivalent of "a British comic Whizzer & Chips/Buster summer special where they all go to the seaside", with sonics "somewhere between Coil's solstice EPs and Kanye's Cruel Summer. Or nowhere near."

More information on the contributions of the guest musicians, which include  Time Attendant, Jon Brooks, Sarah Angliss, and Howling Moss, can be found here.  

Check out Moon Wiring Club's "visual splicing" for one of the tracks: Knö ~ Morgane (aka Jon Brooks)

A coda to the post on Moon Wiring Club's Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets and the involvement of Sarah Angliss, who supplied recorder sounds. She tells me:

"Ian invited me to play on the album after he heard The Bird Fancyer's Delight - a documentary I put together about the use of birds as primordial domestic sound recorders, centuries before the invention of the phonograph. A lot of the recorder fragments on the album are based on eighteenth-century tunes, composed for birds to learn". You can check out Sarah's radio documentary here.

Ian Hodgson himself mentioned that the genesis of Today Bread came from him becoming "obsessed with pitching down birdsong and making rhythms around it."

Like Advent Calendars, round about this time of year, there's always a new Moon Wiring Club album.


Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets is slanted decidedly toward Ian Hodgson's ambient and ethereal side. When it does slip into beat-mode, the grooves are unusual: Ian tinkered with his PS2's time function and ended up with something like 6/8. A "Rococo" feel,  according to his friend Sarah Angliss (composer, robot maker, thereminist, historian of sound technology) who also supplied recorder samples for the album.

Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets comes in significantly different compact disc and vinyl versions, with some tracks not on CD and some tracks not on the vinyl.

This is a video for a track from the LP.

   And this is a video for a track from the compact disc.

Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets -- ruddy splendid.


Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets -- the perfect stocking filler

(well, if you get the CD)