Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Tidings of Yule

They say Christmas starts earlier every year.  And it can certainly feel like that. But not all seasonal occurrences feel intrusively premature.  Viz, the welcome wintry release of a new Moon Wiring Club long-playing recording, bearing the mos t'peculiar title: Medieval Ice Cream. 

It's great! And it's unusual. Ian H dismantles much of his established sound here. Oh, it still wafts that characteristic clammy aroma, but some key structural fixtures have been absented; the way the music moves feels different. There's no "bouncing ball" basslines; the beat-modes fall into none of his existing templates.  It's sort of ambient, except not: the beats impose a little too much, while remaining too fitful and spasmodic to assemble anything resembling a groove. 

"The far more interesting music that dubstep could have been" - this feels like a line I've reeled out before, but it sort of applies again, here and there. Occasionally there's a corroded clankiness and intricately wound quality to the drum patterns that minds me slightly of Shackleton.  Related to that thought is another thought, or feeling: puzzlement that Moon Wiring Club is not as universally exalted as Burial. Perhaps it's because, mood-wise, the religiose is given a wide berth? Because eeriness is achieved without solemnity? Not that Burial would be improved by jokes exactly (and before this is construed as a jab, let me add that Antidawn is one of my favorites of an otherwise meagre year)

Here's the lead "single" from the album. And here's a MWC mix of related materials  And, in a mos t'peculiar promotional gambit, you can also read a poem penned for each of the six tracks. 

I asked Ian about his fancies and procedures this time round and he kindly divulged: 

"There’s definitely an aspiration to get somewhere I haven’t been before. 

"I’d say the tagline would be ~  ‘Musick that has been damaged by Time Travel, and has the consistency of Ice Cream’. 

"After the Ghost Party Delirium 2xCD (which was fairly straightforward in terms of grid structure) I knew I wanted to do something that was ‘un-quantizable’...  I’d had the title Medieval Ice Cream swirling around my head for a number of years, along with a gathering concept of what that would sound like. I think with early / medieval music, (which I listen to fairly often) it has an immediate set of signifiers and a framework in which you can begin to operate.  I wanted something that had that ‘ye owd’ vibe (and visual language) but with a complete (or as complete as I could muster) de-anchoring from the expected musical framework. 

"The main image I was inspired by, was of being deep within a vast medieval frosty winter forest (no leaves, icy mist, eerie pale blue light etc) and hearing the sound of a flute bouncing and echoing around the trees from an indeterminate distance. I naturally continued with this thought, and imagined that if you swapped out the flute with a variety of other instruments (such as a basic drum machine) / voices and then recorded them, you’d have a set of musical stems that, while belonging to the same track and featuring the same organic quality, would overlap and struggle to catch-up with themselves over their duration.

"If (wait for it) this music was all initially captured in a frozen state, then began to gradually thaw out, the sounds would also start to congeal together, much like melting ice cream. The specific ice cream I was thinking off was a Smarties M*Flurry - a tub of processed ice cream with  a load of Smarties frozen inside. As the tub is consumed, the food colouring on the smarties begins to run into the melting vanilla ice cream, until all you’re left with is a lurid slop of fluorescent additives. 

"The album is also inspired a bit by that feeling in a telly program, where someone has definitive proof of the supernatural or time travel, but when the evidence is presented to an incredulous present-day official, it begins to fade away, or what was a complex piece of machinery is now a peculiar sculpture made of twine and twigs." 

More about the album from the Gecophonic page: 

"MEDIEVAL ICE CREAM (GEpH016LP) is permanently on the cusp of being ambient / non-ambient. Beats wobble and shimmy like jelly. Tracks have been de-boned but the skeleton remains, staggering around in a hazy twilight of delighted eerie-delirium. Tunes skate along multiple frosty grooves within themselves to only occasionally converge. Shards of broken ice form melted rhythms while a Medieval Ice Cream van careers serenely down a distant misty ravine." 

You can purchase Medieval Ice Cream here . The album comes with a A4 Premium 225gsm Matte paper Art Print.

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Update 12/2/2022

Further Moon Wiring Club tidings - there is a vinyl repress of Psychedelic Spirit Show just out.

Here's a taster in the form of a very cool monochrome videoclip

What ho! Literally as I am posting this update, I receive a tiding MWC Central that there is also a vinyl edition of A Spare Tabby At the Cat's Wedding that has just come out. 

summertime sludge

Time during lockdown grew mushy and amorphous, didn't it? So it's not too much of a surprise - but a nice surprise nonetheless - to get a new Moon Wiring Club album in the early summer, rather than in the approach to Christmas as is usual. 

Here's the first promo video off of the elpee - "Catwalk of the Phantom Baroque"

The record consists of four long (ten minute or so) tracks infirmly situated in favorite MWC terrain - marshy but not completely gaseous... stumbling beats that never quite establish a gait... the dilapidated beat-structure wraithed around with after-images and palimpsests. 

Opener "Summoning Up  An Immaculate Ancestor" suggests 23 Skidoo in an advanced stage of decomposition. Third track "Empty Door in the Eye of Sun" wafts an eldritch whiff of Dead Can Dance... or perhaps an abandoned-house remix of FSOL "Papua New Guinea" with sunken floors, stairs missing, peeling wallpaper

The level of layering and apparitional movement within the stereo field is tantalisingly rich  and edible-complex.... a headphone treat (if also an inner-ear imbalance inducer).

Ian Hodgson elaborates upon the release rationale for this unseasonal excursion: 

"... it’s the sister release to The Most Unusual Cat in the Village ...  I’d written a lot of additional music / musicke / mew-sicke for that album with the intention of releasing it at some stage. While I was putting up the final promo image for that LP, which consisted of a phantom figure marching down an empty street in town... I instantly visualised the aesthetic for a sister album which more-or-less wrote itself / congealed there and then. 

"The main image I had was of a giant phantom catwalk circling around a clock tower in the dead centre of an empty town shrouded in green mist. While this was going on, the accompanying music would be drifting in from different locations all at slightly varying points in time. So a harpsichord would be playing 100 feet away in a street below, whilst a drum kit played from the top of a multi story carpark. You would be completely stationary, whilst the music moved around, continually out of phase. I wanted something that was stately, magisterial and completely knackered. The experience is sluggish (‘Is it day?’) and disorientating, and much like drowsy wasps in the Spring could turn nasty at any moment. 

"This Catwalk idea provided the structure for the album, and I composed 'Catwalk of the Phantom Baroque' and then arranged the other tracks into a narrative accordingly. The first track 'Summoning Up an Immaculate Ancestor', almost made it onto The Most Unusual Cat LP because it has (certainly for MWC) a pretty unusual sound but I think it works exactly right as the starter in the context of this LP ~ coaxing things out of a mirror for a supernatural fashion show but forgetting to close the doorway. 

"In my mind 'Summoning Up an Immaculate Ancestor' is classified as Sludge-Rock, but that doesn’t seem to be an actual genre and online seems to suggest Dinosaur Jr which is not what I was after. Maybe Slush Rock is closer? Music where everything has melted. That detuned repeated riff is what I imagine Sleep to sound like...  Maybe something like James Plotkin’s 'Joy of Disease' which is a perennial favourite is closer and certainly an influence ~  'Catwalk of the Phantom Baroque' ended up (because of the ultra-sloth pacing) sounding to me a bit like Bohren and Der Club of Gore ~ 'Empty Door in the Eye of the Sun' has a cavernous cathedral-ish reverb, that while initially dolloped on to coax out a tiny vocal sample (like a potters wheel) does provide definite goth ambience. The ‘Sunken Techno’ bit made me think of the 1999 Sturm LP ~ s one of my all time favourite records. 

"The beginning of 'Everything Eventually Goes Completely Grey' has someone saying ‘I met a ghost’ over a warped Carnival of Souls style organ, and the end of has a bit of a Thomas Köner vibe. TK on a budget anyway. I sort of see it as everything dissolving into a washing sea tide of grey mist ~ a collapsing aftermath after you’ve escaped. 

"Perhaps the main thing I like (and wanted) about this album is that (so far) it doesn’t seem to settle. Perhaps someone listening will immediately go ‘oh it sounds just like such-and-such’ which of course it may well do, but when I first received the test pressings I was amusingly puzzled + pleasingly disorientated with the results, as if the ‘off-season’ compositional time frame and condensed gestation time has conjured up something enjoyably unfamiliar and slightly out of control, and that feeling hasn’t yet gone away. "

Buy The Only Cat Left In Town direct from the Gecophonic gift shop. 

Check out some ancillary imagery at the Moon Wiring website.

Hauntology Parish Mōdraniht Newsletter : The Most Unusual Cat in the Village

 New Moon Wiring Club matter ahoy!

A bumper package, this season - not just an LP, but a vinyl 7-inch single too... and a hardback book, and a calendar! 

The LP is one of Ian Hodgson's best for a while -  while I enjoyed the beat-oriented short 'n' sweet bite-size focus of the recent runny of release, I do ultimately favor the foggy marshland vibe. The Most Unusual Cat In the Village is nicely portioned out as four long tracks all in the 10-minute range, enabling you to sink into a mood. But it's not completely wraithscape ambience - there are beats, but their gait is peculiar and halting. Insistent but frustrated, like feet trying to make headway through soggy ground. 

The book-of-the-album is gorgeous to fondle and peruse. Hardback but without a dust jacket, the cover images printed directly onto the cardboard, like a twilight-zone version of a school textbook... inside it's full-colour illustrated on every page... the effect hovering somewhere between a book of images with large captions and a comic book story without panels or speech bubbles. 

          

I quizzed Ian H about the sound procedures and narrative thematics involved this time around:

"The main ‘beat’ idea was to start off with something minimal, and see how much you could stretch out of it. So rather than multiprogramming 38 different snare patterns, it was taking something like a 1960s easy listening LP sample (of about 4 seconds) and seeing if you could loop that for ages, applying different filters and effects (hellooooo reverbbbbbbbbb) without it being just an experiment. (Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room is the main inspiration here ~ I don’t listen to it often, but I think about it all the time). 

"I did a few (loads) of these extended loops (beats / melody / vocal / environmental / etc) and then overlaid the different parts in various combinations.... 'Spiritwave Communication' was the beat loop I liked the best ~ I see it as a solid flan-base you can keep adding ingredients to. The more jelly / fruit / cream dolloped on, the more the base beings to sag, but the more tasty it sonically becomes. It collapses almost completely at some points, then re-solidifies at the end. 

"The 4 x 10 minute LP format was a good way of structuring the music ~ long enough to allow everything room to breathe (whilst being different to the more standard 10-14 tunes you can fit onto a 40 minute LP) but short enough to prevent things from degenerating into slog-fest tedium.... 

"Thematically, I’ve had an idea for many years of an ARGO-style LP cover where a pop-folk singer was also a vampire. It was (for me) a really strong visual that never went away, but I couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it, or how the music would sound.... Roll on January 2020... a medieval plague appeared....  Being a pedestrian in lockdown meant there was no public transport, and where I live it takes about 20 minutes by foot to get to somewhere interesting. So on my daily 2020 walks of up to three hours I couldn’t ever quite escape the distinctly claustrophobic feeling of being permanently walled-in. After a while it began to feel like a mundane horror-film, a bit like the 70s Amicus ‘present-day’ Portmanteaus where daft things happen to slumming character actors. 

"Vampires traditionally appear during plague years so after a while it became clear 2020 was unquestionably the purrrfect time for that long-contemplated MWC 'Vampire Folk Singer on the Cover’ LP. If you had to sum the LP up quickly I’d say ‘Attempted Escape from Claustrophobic Village’ would do the trick. 

"I also quite like the slightly ‘trashy’ horror aspect ~ it stops things getting overly antiseptic and neatly formatted. I was pleased with how the cover turned out ~ it’s pretty much exactly the image that was in my head all these years. Like something safe had gone wrong. Which, you could argue, for a lot of people might sum up 2020. 

"There was so much stuff going around and clogging up my mind, that I thought you could even write a novel about it. 

"Generally speaking, you could either do something creative this year that offered a means of escape, or reflected in someway what was going on around you. The conclusion I personally came to, was as there was no means of escape, creating something that actually reflected this ~ 'escape from claustrophobic village' ~ was the only fulfilling course of action." 

"The Jass of Thun ‘festive single’ seemed like a good companion piece. The idea presented itself when I was experimenting with reverse bell loop sound that accidentally sounded like sleigh-bells, and it all snowballed (ho ho ho) from there." 

                                          

Visit the gift shop at the new Moon Wiring Club website and pick up these choice items. 

Release rationale #1a

The Most Unusual Cat in the Village (GEpH014LP) features 4 long-form compositions that elongate beat-loopery into a fragmented-demented dreame-language, coax easy-listening ultra-paste possessed possession collages into hallucinatory dreamscape wanderings, fuse phantom-light exotic artistic endeavours into a beyond the grave reverie and Collapse sunken-dreame-ship winebar musicke into a multi-temporal reality incantation escape wave-loop ritual. 

Release rationale #1b

This delightful matt laminated A5 Hardbound book features 92 pages of full colour 200gsm MWC photo-collage-illustration with an unusual, dreamlike narrative-wandering text that could quite possibly eerily echo the claustrophobic implausibility of 1596 / 1898 / 2020.

Release rationale #2

JASS OF THUN is a jaunty-step classic MWC ritualistic concoction that deftly conjures alpine-deity seasonal activities with a spicy abundance of irresistibly-curdled melodic offerings and off-piste aural manifestations! AWARD THYSELF and (possible) future generations this FESTIVE TREAT / FESTERING THREAT

Release rationale #3

Professionally manufactured and ring-bound, this full colour A3 170gsm silk calendar will provide a hypnotic, unearthly focal-point for blank space reinvigoration and illuminate even the most subdued Billiard Room support-wall / executive crypt.

isolation mix

Moon Wiring Club with a hunkered-in-the-bunker mix that starts with bouncy electrokitsch and heads into a blend of  early UKtekno, twisty-turny Nineties IDM, and unusual breakbeat hardcore choices. Excellent selection, expertly threaded. 

EVP MVP mix by MWC

A tasty and unusual mix from Moon Wiring Club



The flavour here is "mainly 90s off-kilter instrumental hip-hop and electronica tracks" featuring the likes of Tek 9 and Luke Vibert, and generally echoing Ian Hodgson's formative love of illbient, Wordsound and Skam. MWC in head-nod, boom-bap mode - loping, lurching, swampy, spacey, texture-dolloped and droopy-lidded. 

But draped also with lots and lots of the vintage telly-derived voice-snippets that you expect and love from MWC.

Hauntology Parish Newsletter spring 2019 - Moon Wiring Club, Baron Mordant,The Caretaker

In the new edition of The Wire, I have an extended essay-review about the career-closing releases from The Caretaker and Mordant Music: the sixth and final installment of James Kirby's gargantuan Everywhere at the end of Time project, which started three years ago, and Baron Mordant's last blast, Mark of the Mould. The latter is an unmissable emission - like eMMplekz if the Baron handled the backing tracks as well as the verbals... the latter proving once again that Ian Hicks is simultaneously the Robert Macfarlane of built-up Britain and the Chris Morris of BoomkatKultur.



Also ruffling the parish this month - and making this newsletter a tale of two Ians - is the announcement of an unexpected, non-wintertime release from Moon Wiring Club aka Ian Hodgson. 






Ghastly Garden Centres is a timely swerve from the ambient-amorphous direction of recent MWC releases and a jaunty step into brisk concision. In fact, the guiding concept here is that every track is a single - making the assemblage perhaps a Now! style compilation of hits, or a chart countdown. It's MWC - so it's still creepy and manky - but it's also catchy and bouncy.

As for the ghostly-ghastly gardening theme - well, apparently this is a real thing, a subject of internet obsession: abandoned, overgrown plant nurseries and derelict garden centres.



Further raising the pulse of parishioners is the parallel release of Catmask, a collection -  styled as issue no. 1 of a glossy magazine - of Ian Hodgson's artwork: some already released, on the records or at the Blank Workshop website, but much unfamiliar and never seen. There are images from Ian's abandoned children's book project, for instance, which if I recall correctly, was the acorn from which grew the mighty oak of Clinkskell and the 21 - or 23, depending on how you count -  releases to date, including collaborations and side projects.


                                                   


Catmask is a gorgeous slinky looking and feeling object to peruse and fondle. It completes the sense of Moon Wiring Club as a project of.... I won't say, world-building, as that's a cliche now... but place-making, maybe.


                                                    

UK customers can buy Ghastly Garden Centres and Catmask here 

European customers can buy Ghastly Garden Centres and Catmask here 

Rest of world customers can buy Ghastly Garden Centres and Catmask here 

ROUTLEDGE DEXTER SATELLITE SYSTEMS MIX = a brand-new audio assemblage from Mr Moon Wiring Club...  months in the gestation, it's rather different from his usual mixology .. more overloaded and choppy...  Horse's mouth indicates the original intent ("started off as very much a ‘murky hip-hop’ mix") and the different outcome ("grew organically into something else... picture the whole thing like a malfunctioning satellite broadcast, different channels spluttering spasmodically then fizzing out") while also revealing that the constituent elements include the hhactor Edward Woodward, Zoviet France + Evan Parker, and a surprising amount of contemporary music (Actress, Ikonika, Best  Available Technology). 

Official mix manifesto:  

"Greetings Citizen Volunteers! CLASP your swanky bakelite listening devices and tune into the ROUTLEDGE DEXTER SATELLITE SYSTEMS MIX ~ unquestionably the finest in MWC deftly-spliced disjointed hip-hop wonky radio-play melodic oddness around! Freshly Near Mint / almost unplayable antique sonic-slices are politely cajoled-up inside a labyrinthine audio-mesh extracted from video archive endurance excursion-sagas of perplexingly perpetual proportions! But don't get greedy Stu ~ an abundance of rhythmic propulsion & uncanny momentum is never far from t'derangement table. Endeavour to enjoy!"

tantalising news

Often when a recording artist reaches that point where it feels fitting to release a 

best-of / greatest-hits -  or a career-spanning commemorative archival anthology -  it seems to signal  (or even, in some obscure fashion, precipitate) the end of their musical journey. A silence ensues. Perhaps followed, after a long interval, by a wan comeback. Perhaps followed by nothing at all. 

In Mr. Hodgson's case, he has not only returned punctually, at his usual time of year, but he has come back stronger than ever, with a triple-dollop of some of Moon Wiring Club's best work yet: the double-CD Tantalising Mews and the vinyl long-player Cateared Chocolatiers.
                                   
                                       


                                                                              

Noteworthy is the attractive new-look packaging for Tantalising Mews: a cardboard gatefold, with no information on the front, back or inside (indeed the release only identifies itself on the spine).

                                       


In a pouch lurks a fold-out insert that supplies the titles of the thirty-three  - thirty-three! - tracks on the pair of discs, and hints at the narrative framework that links them: "wireless telegraphy - from the immaculate ghost of an identical ancestor".  Perhaps informed here by the analogy that 19th Century spiritualists saw between remote communication with the dead and the recently invented telegraph?


                                      

Cateared Chocolatiers contains - in the form of a brightly coloured fold-out poster -  the board to a game that involves "a journey through a rococo town of rolled-up carpets and crumbling toffee buildings in order to catch a train from a weird rural station you know you’re going to miss." The boardgame can be played by following the rules printed on one side of the disc's intricately illustrated dust jacket and by consulting the cast of characters arrayed and described on the other side.

                                      

Noteworthy also: the sounds.  "Ghostly drifting molten landscape musicke" is how Blank Workshop characterise the contents of Chocolatiers.  And indeed that album especially, but all three of the discs,  push the ambient-leaning tendencies in previous Moon Wiring Club music to a new extreme of ectoplasmic exquisiteness and sickly malaise.  Beats, barely mustering the will to manifest, are decrepit and ineffectual entitities, rarely cohering into a pulse, let alone a groove. Voices droop and decompose, releasing vapours that fog the brain and obnubilate concentration. The mind wanders into mist-shrouded, boggy terrain...  mistakes marshy phosphors for beacons... gets lost... founders...

A true return to formlessness.

You can place advance orders for this Christmas hamper bulging with sticky delight here and here.

                                                        

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)

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)