Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling distinctly under the weather and one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box.
The anniversary celebration came about when a light bulb went off above my head and I realized that I'd extravagantly commemorated twenty years of Creel Pone earlier this year but clean forgot about my other favorite record label of the 21st Century, Ghost Box. The two imprints seemed linked in my mind as heroic projects - both in their different ways manifestations of archive fever, the disinterment of buried futures.... and sources of immense ongoing pleasure for this listener.
My feelings about Ghost Box are expressed best in this thing I wrote for the 10th Anniversary in 2015.
Twenty years - goodness me, how time has flown by! Two whole decades since I and the late Reverend Fisher started rambling on about hauntology (although of course the entity had been taking nebulous form for a goodly while before its christening).
Chiltern Radio's Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick kindly invited me to chat with them about the anniversary for their show Cujo (short for The Culture Journalist) . You can eavesdrop on the witterings over here.
Further musings on this merry-melancholy subject at the end of this newsletter, but first some new news - activity in the parish.
A bursting hamper of Moon Wiring Club music - the double-CD / double-LP Gruesome Shrewd and a cassette, Grisly Exaggerated - across which Ian Hodgson develops a new sound, at once recognisably MWC and a defamiliarizing extension. Avail yourself of the "Grisly Bundle" at his online shoppe and get a taster with this film below.
Trying to pinpoint its qualities, a couple of phrases sprung to mind...."Time becomes a quicksand" is one, and the other is "stretchy". As it happens, Ian himself uses the phrase "endless elongation" in the release-rationale below.
These tracks reminds me of the process by which Brighton or Blackpool rock is made: a thick slab of taffy gets extruded out to enormous length, in the process thinning out while still retaining its internal patterning. It's the vocal element, more pronounced and grotesquely deformed than ever, that forms the "lettering" inside the stick of rock that is each sprawling track on Gruesome and Grisly.
As it turns out, the idea of tooth-enamel-eroding souvenir treats bought at the seaside is a suitable thought given that the albums are loosely inspired by coach tours and the sensation of temporal suspension experienced while on holiday. Take it away, Ian:
"One of the main aesthetic influences was what I describe as ‘Coach World’ ~ that feeling on a holiday (or long journey) that you’ve got to spend 18 hours on a coach. At first you think ‘I’m going to snap’ but then after 3 hours you get into a different rhythm and before long (after 8 hours) you kind of can’t remember what life was like before you started the journey ~ hence entering Coach World. What I wanted was music that has something of that endless elongation vibe. Initially daunting, then meditative, then you don’t want to leave and have to listen again....
Another aesthetic influence was the idea of Holiday Memory ~ a fleeting moment of a holiday situation (going around an art gallery for example), where you can remember with clarity (or what your brain thinks is clarity) a specific moment (the angle of the walls, how the lighting looked, spotlights on glass, colours maybe scents or what you were feeling) forever hightened in your mind in a specific way (because you are on holiday) but you have little or no memory of what preceded / succeeded that moment. So you end up with a loop of thought, or a series of loops as a memory of a holiday from 20, 30, 40+ years ago. Over time they might not all even be from the same holiday.... This concept was something that kept popping into my mind as I assembled the music, sort of ‘bursts of heightened memory looping’.
"Sonic Procedure wise, I was getting bored of limited melodic chord changes and wanted something that had a bit of distance from what my standard compositional impulses were. Essentially the majority of the music is comprised of micro-samples (like a snap blast of fuzzy background music on a VHS tape documentary c1982) that are then cleaned up a bit and subjected to endless processes (re-sampling is apparently the key word here). After doing this for several months I had a substantial wonky library of component tune elements that were then deployed in the guiding service of the Gruesome Shrewd package holiday aesthetic.
What I found was that generally the tracks fell into 3 styles ~
a) Sludgy Psyche Rock
b) 80s Corporate Corroded
c) Ambient Slurry (naturally there was also a judicious application of disembodied voices).
I suppose you could say this sort of sound world is Chopped + Screwed (which does sound a little like Gruesome Shrewd) but whereas (in my non-expert knowledge) C&S tends to have that nice thick syrupy sound + big bass + distortion, I’d say there’s something different going on with GS/GE even though some of the production techniques would be fairly similar. It’s sort of elongated chewing toffee bar mids rather than cough syrup mixture lows.
Compositionally I wanted something that sounded different to the more DAW / Electronica aspects of some MWC stuff ~ ‘here are the beats / here goes the bass / that melody works as a chorus / tighten up that bit / move the last bit to the beginning as it has a better hook’ etc. When putting these tracks together, quite often I went against my instincts and instead of tightening things up, deliberately left things more loose and allowed elements to play out / loop for longer...
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Coaches - specifically the rippled patterns of rain streaking down the windows of a coach in motion - is one of the mental images that often comes to when listening to the music of Lo Five. Another is the foreshortening effect on your visual range caused by light drizzle, a muffling of distance. Something about the grey-scale shimmer summons those mundane-mystical moments where boredom and bliss are so very close indeed.
There is a new Lo Five record - Superdank, released on Lunar Module, a CD-oriented imprint of Castles in Space - and it pulls me into its paradoxically inertial motion as irresistibly as ever. Slipping Time's moorings again....
Release rationale:
Lo Five is as proud as he is anxious to present SUPERDANK, a CD album packed to the green gills with heavy dubs for sleepy schlubs.
SUPERDANK is ostensibly presented as a collection of hardware stoner jams, structured in the form of an hour long edible-induced psycho-narrative, taking the listener on an aural voyage - kicking off at pleasant buzztown, calling past existential paranoiaville, then landing back in the relative safety of sofaborough in time for tea and crumpets.
But what is SUPERDANK? What does it mean?
If we were were inclined to illustrate the vibe, we'd say it's along the lines of:
• Forgetting you had an A-level exam because you were busy making the world's largest hash brown
• Having a panic attack in the shower because you couldn't gauge how hot the water was
• Claiming to have invented the story to The Matrix before watching The Matrix
• Using the pages of a bible for cigarette paper after running out of Rizlas
Is SUPERDANK a flimsy concept designed to package a bunch of disparate tracks we weren't sure wether to release or not? Or is it more of a subconscious collective fugue state, woven into the very fabric of our confused mental substrate? Maybe it's both? Who cares?
In either case draw the blinds, turn off your mobile and settle in for a trip you'll potentially regret forever, because it's time... for SUPERDANK...
Lunar Module is thrilled to present the latest album from Wirral based sonic alchemist Neil Grant, better known as Lo Five – a record that feels like it was beamed in from a parallel dimension where melody and madness hold hands.
In an era dominated by algorithmic predictability, Lo Five remains that rarest of artists: a producer whose music is unashamedly strange yet somehow impossibly tuneful. It’s the sound of a Commodore 64 dreaming it’s a jazz orchestra, or a broken music box trying to remember a rave from 1993 – familiar enough to hum along, alien enough to make the hairs on your neck stand up in delighted confusion.
Beyond the speakers, Neil Grant is a quietly heroic figure in the UK electronic underground. The time he pours into supporting fellow artists – organising events, mentoring newcomers, championing overlooked talent – make him as vital a community builder as he is an innovator in the studio.
This new Lo Five album is more than a collection of tracks; it’s a reminder that electronic music can still surprise, unsettle, and seduce in equal measure. It’s strange. It’s tuneful. It’s essential.
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American exchange student Daniel Lopatin has a fab new album out, Tranquilizer.
Over at Line Noise, though, Ben Cardew invokes conceptronica in trying to explain why's he not feeling this new Oneohtrix Point Never record.
Although tickled by this idea that I danced myself right out the womb, I have to do whatever the opposite of co-sign is here: partly because I don't generally find Dan's conceptual apparatus to be overbearing, it works more as a bonus supplement for the listener, but also because I loved Tranquilizer on first listen, as a simple flood of aural pleasure, no cerebration required. (I also don't think Oneohtrix has ever really been in the business of making people dance, so it seems an odd expectation). The conceptual aspect seem to work primarily as a germinal spur for the artist. In this case, the procedure involves sample CDs from the 1990s as a source that is then put through a series of processes - sounds connotative of luxury, relaxation, high-quality, are then tesselated in ways that are weirder and more abstract than their original intended function, but retain the aura of polish and professionalism
There seems to be a spectrum of ways artists in this approximate area operate. Some have a defined framing concept from the start (The Caretaker, or Debit), others work with a procedure or an idea of what the starter material is going to be (restriction, or focus, as the mother of invention). Some (Ghost Box for example) have a mood board, a constellation of musical and non-musical reference points and coordinates that give the project its consistency without overdeterming it. And then others still grope about in the formless dark, molding and grappling without any premeditated notion of where they are going, following intuition and instinct until a direction or shape emerges (I imagine this is how Autechre go about it). In the end, it doesn't really matter - the outcome is all that counts.
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Up at the Insitute, there's been a flurry of archival activity.
Notably Jean-Michel Jarre's very vaporwave looking if not sounding experimental electronic album of 1972, Deserted Palace
And also collations of work by Bernie Parmegiani and by ex-wife Jean Schwarz
The Bernie collection includes his marvelous music for this marvelous animation by Piotr Kamler, which almost singlehandedly propelled me into the (once fevered, now somewhat dormant) obsession with experimental animation as fitfully still expressed at the blog Dreams, Built By Hand and its attendant ever-growing playlist, which would take at least a week to watch through. You'll notice that "L’araignéléphant" - it translates as "The Spider Elephant" - is the first film at the top of that playlist.
Another archival release of recent years, now itself reissued in spiffed up form, comes from our Irish affiliates the Miúin label: Kilkenny Electroacoustic Lab Volume 1 now comes with a book and a poster.
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