Hauntology Parish Newsletter Yuletide Edition: Ghost Box 20th; Moon Wiring Club; Lo Five; Oneohtrix Point Never; Jean-Michel Jarre, Bernie Parmegiani, Ms. Jean Schwarz, Kilkenny Electroacoustic Lab

Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling distinctly 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 images that often comes to mind 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 overdetermining 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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Ghost Box, I'm told, is actually in a state of hibernation these days, with one driving force occupied with other non-sonic activities and the other pushing into different areas with his Belbury Music imprint.  Its most recent release is Runner's High by Pneumatic Tubes (an alias for Jesse Chandler of Midlake /Mercury Rev) - a concept album about running.

Intriguing murmurs reach my ears of the mood board for forthcoming Jim Jupp music - Bill Nelson, Clannad, Associates, Japan, Axxess (whoever the hell they may be)... fretless bass, E-bow guitar, and the 82-84 transition moment between analogue and clunky early digital.  I do not know if it will be as Belbury Poly or some other identity.

There is a parallel between the evolution of Ghost Box and my favorite labels of the '90s, Moving Shadow and Reinforced: sampladelic producers who gradually get into playing hardware analogue synths, electric and even acoustic instruments. That maturing into musicianship generated some wonderful dividends in both cases, but for me the core of hauntology, as it was with hardcore jungle, involves the sorcery of sampling: chunks of dead time reanimated. Ardkore and hauntology are both wyrd British mutant forms of hip hop. 

The collage aspect is one reason why Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is the supreme visual artwork counterpart to what Ghost Box and Moon Wiring Club and The Caretaker would later do. Indeed the film’s audio element prefigures hauntology (the film was made in 1999). Fiorucci is also a convergence point  - alongside Caretaker's The Death of Rave - between the Moving Shadow/Reinforced realm and the Ghost Box et al world.   (Clean forgot that the Fiorucci audio-score actually came out on a imprint called The Death of Rave). Dream English Kid 1964-1999, although based around a different memoradelic mood board, is also in this zone of revenant reverie as memory work. 

We really should arrange a showing of both films at the Film Club. 

Let me wind up this newsletter with my Top 20 Ghost Box releases (including a couple that are technically on another label but still count as GB in my mind)

1/ The Focus Group - hey let loose your love

2/ Belbury Poly - The Willows

3/ The Advisory Circle - Other Channels

4/ Roj - The Transactional Dharma Of Roy

5/ The Focus Group - Sketches and Spells 

6/ The Advisory Circle - Mind How You Go

7/ ToiToiToi - Vaganten

8/ Eric Zann  - Ouroborindra 

9/Belbury Poly - From An Ancient Star

10/  Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age 

11/ John Foxx and the Belbury Circle - Empty Avenues 

12/ Beautify Junkyards - Cosmorama

13/ The Focus Group - Electrik Karousel 

14/  The Advisory Circle - From Out Here 

15/ Belbury Poly -  Farmer's Angle

16/ Children of Alice

17 / The Focus Group - Stop Motion Happening with the Focus Groop

18/ Beautify Junkyards - Nova 

19/ ToiToiToi - Im Hag

20/ Beautify Junkyards - The Invisible World of 

And then in a special category of its own

Paul Weller - In Another Room 

(mainly just for the sheer shock surprise of its existing and him being a fan but a creditable  effort)

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Suddenly remembered that it was Julian and Jim who did the early version of this very circular,  cranking it out back then on a hand-operated mimeograph.  I can find barely any proof of its existence online but I know I have a paper-and-ink copy somewhere: The Belbury Parish Magazine.

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The half-lives of hauntology continue - word reaches me of this book, out on Reaktion next summer. 

By my count, this is the fourth substantial book on the H-zone (not counting the A Year in the Country ever-growing series of volume, or the 'pastoral horror'  microgenre or  'scarred by 70s kids tell'-sploitation subset).

I suppose the first would be our dear lost boy's Ghosts of My Life. 

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Harvest Edition - Lo Five; eMMplekz; A Year in the Country; Belbury Poly

 Spied in the window of Book Nook!

Cover Design by Rachel Laine

Alerted by Folk Horror Revival - detective work by John Coulhart at { feuilleton }

Also to be seen on the shelves of the Book Nook  

Yes, a new tome from the prolific Stephen Prince  -  A Year in the Country: Lost Transmissions: Dystopic Visions, Alternate Realities, Paranormal Quests and Exploratory Electronica

It follows swiftly on the heels of last year's A Year in the Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands: The Rural Dreamscapes, Reimagined Mythical Folklore and Shadowed Undergrowth of Film and Television  - and the three A Year in the Country books that preceded that! With another two tomes not in the series, that makes seven in total.

I don't know how Stephen does it...  I feel like a right slow-poke in comparison.

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Talking about prolific fellows, Lo Five has a very nice new record, Persistence of Love, recently released on Castles in Space. Inhabiting that muzzy grayscale sound that is all his own. Makes you feel as if there's a film across your ears - like looking at a landscape with reduced visibility caused by light rain. Suits these unseasonably overcast and damp days here in England. 

Here's Neil's release rationale: 

"This collection of tracks came about during a period of transition for me, from changing the way I wanted to make music to a method that was more intuitive and free-flowing. I spent a lot of time experimenting with sequencing and different bits of hardware I'd acquired. I was also playing around with an old four track cassette recorder, which was loads of fun. I think the end result feels a little broader in sound and composition as all but one of these tracks were the result of recording a live jam down to a stereo mix. I recorded dozens of these until I'd found 'the one'.

"That way of capturing a performance really excites me, it's like a crystallised moment in time when the planets have aligned. When you're really absorbed into the flow of it and there's something extra guiding you.

"Thematically, it all reflects this ongoing interest I have in consciousnesses, spiritual enlightenment, truth realisation, whatever you want to call it. At the time I'd been reading a lot about advaita, which is Sanskrit for 'not two', or what western spiritual teachers call non-duality, where it's seen there is no separation between anything, no individual self, no subject and object, just this infinite eternal consciousness. I read a few of the classic teachings from gurus such as Ramaana Maharishi, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Nisargadatta Maharaj, which reflect modern accounts of contemporary teachers like Richard Rose, Jan, Frazier and Rupert Spira.

"There seems to be this slow reconciliation between ancient eastern spiritual teachings and western psychology and neuroscience. That really fascinates me and seems to filter through to whatever I'm working on."

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Unexpected silo seepage from a retiree of this parish! A trio of remixes by Baron Mordant of eMMplekz fan favorite, "Gloomy Leper Techno" - also on Castles in Space

Emission transmission: 

The collaborative eMMplekz project between Baron Mordant and Ekoplekz ran itself ragged from 2012-2016 and yielded some of their most satisfying work for the Mordant Music label - the Baron had finally found his voice in a skip behind Poundland and let his fetid alphabet loose across Ekoplekz’s mouldy electronic battlefield…lyrical Escher abstractions married to Cy Twombly soundscapes at a time when maybe only the Sleaford Mods were harrowing similar ground, albeit more commercially…the project bowed out on a low high with the ‘Rook to TN34’ album and the “Cheers mate, bye” lyric pinging off every surface…in 2022 with that still naggingly in mind the Baron set out on reframing ‘Gloomy Leper Techno’ in some different shades and the resulting ‘MMongrel versions’ were picked up by Castles in Space for this 12” vinyl

release…njoi/endure…IBM, Hastings 2023.

 

GLT scrawl:

“Cheers mate, bye

I see rooftops in Staines, people as drains (cheers mate, bye)

The bee in the bonnet humming Ashcroft’s ’Sonnet’ (cheers mate, bye)

Rhyming’s like climbing, surmounting a fountain (cheers mate, bye)

Wanking the walk, tanking the talk (cheers mate, bye)

A dismal day in every way (cheers mate bye)

Bandcamp’s digital damp (cheers mate bye)

I want you to follow thru…why is it you let him in?

Cheers mate, bye.”

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Finally, there's a new Belbury Poly album out  on Ghost Box in a few days time - The Path. 

It's unusual - a full-band sound, incorporating a spoken-word element. And the voice speaks in an American accent!

Hauntology Parish Newsletter

Cranking the mimeograph to bring you a smatter of summertime tidings.

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New from  Lo Five, the EP Lack - marbled fog blocs for fuzzy heads ("Thicc Air", one of these four tracks is titled - and sounds like it).  

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Moon Wiring Club have only just made the most recent releases, Ghost Party Delirium CD and Ghost Party Delirium LP (completely separate records) digitally available on Bandcamp. These I slept on a bit, arriving very late in 2021 as they did, but the CD in particular - a double - has resurged as listening for me recently and I recommend a deep delve.  I got stuck on this one tune "The Original Phantom Roller", entranced by its descending-and-ascending reverbed B-line and hall-of-mirror recession of  lady voices ("watch the light!", "who's real, then? Me - or you"). Having played it  at least thirty times now, I feel certain it would make an all-time MWC Top Twenty.  Another killer is this crepuscular creeper with slap-bass twinges as unexpected and alarming as a tendon snapping. 

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Another oldie but goodie - really old in fact, and really good (among the Top Five Greatest Hauntological Recordings Ever) - is something whose first-time vinyl reincarnation bypassed me some months ago: Dead Air by Mordant Music. One of that first cluster of albums that made it clear something was happening that needed monitoring and monikering, the CD's mustard-hued fold-out has been gorgeously scaled up into a gatefold elpee by Castles in Space, with new artwork from Admiral Greyscale worked in there. And the audio has been remastered for vinyl - hear here the new edition's first side of dankly glistening glory. 

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Beautify Junkyards have just released the lovely and eerie film Cosmorama Moving Images. A creative ruse around the challenges of touring in a locked down world, it documents a live performance by the band in a space  teeming with video projections, with surrealistic interludes involving spoken word from Justin Hopper of Old Weird Albion renown. "The environment becomes labyrinthine and the band's vibrant performance seems to induce the formation of spatial and temporal portals that spectators are invited to cross." Inspirations include Victorian London's Cosmorama rooms and the experimental film maker Stan VanDerBeek.  

You can see the movie at Vimeo On Demand. 

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Not really from this parish - but let's say he's an exchange student - Estonian pop aesthete Mart Avi has an  excellent new album out, Blade. 

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Canadian exchange student Samuel Macklin (better known as  connect_icut) has a collaborative project with Larissa Loyva called The Bastion Mews. Their latest emanation is this eddying haze of songspace titled "Sinking" and paired with the songspacier "Sinking Dub". It's the second in a series of singles - check out also last month's "Sweet" b/w "Sweet Dub."

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A postcard from our Italian twin town Artetetra foretells an imminent ectoplasmic apparition: Loris Cericola's Metaphysical Graffiti.  

Release rationale: 

Best described as an obscure, dadaist sound collage, the album was realized entirely by experimenting with an array of tape cut-ups and analog sound manipulation techniques. A set of live improvisations performed with an assemblage of 4-tracks tape recorders, testing the possibilities offered by the textural audio qualities of cassettes. With an imagery shaped by Ed Wood-style geographic and fictional tropes, Metaphysical Graffiti stands as an aural alternative to a subcultural cave painting. The album is an ill-defined conglomerate of unintelligible folklore, flimsy remote voices and phony, signal-like transmissions. A fragmentary listening conjuring the instability of shortwave explorations and the ominous vibes of waking up in the middle of the night after falling asleep in front of a television in an unfamiliar locale. The samples and soundbites emerging from the minimal tracks’ backbone originate from a careful collection built through time by the musician and is composed of miscellaneous forgotten sales bin recordings, abstruse midnight home movies and haphazard library music pieces. Although the ten songs show a tendency towards supernatural, at times eldritch overtones, the work is surprisingly balanced by a direct simplicity. An atmosphere crafted through delicate distension of time and scattered synth themes. For the most part, Metaphysical Graffiti builds on liminal ambiances reminding of the early James Ferraro and Joel Vandroogenbroeck’s "Biomechanoid", crafting a long moment of discontinuous suspension akin to slow opium phantasmagorias. A space crawling with dimensional spooks drawn in sedative-induced reveries and practical-effects era delusions. 

Full waft due June 17

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Finally, I recommend a good dig through our local library's record section. In amongst the budget classical, brass band and Bread albums, you can find some unexpected gems. Like these Eiretronica albums from the 1970s!

For the full story about these releases, go to the Miúin Archives. 

There is also a new curated compilation of work made at the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. 

"The Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory was informally set up in late 1965 by Jacinta Delaney (1937 -) and Eoghan Comerford (1935 -). They were inspired by Groupe de Recherches Musicales after Comerford visited the RTF in Paris in ’64..... The purpose of this collection is an introduction to a selection of works by key characters in the development of K.E.R.L. The structure of the collection gives a general outline of the development of the works throughout the history of the Lab, but it is no way comprehensive."

remissmas

remiss have I been in not remarking upon recent releases that are remarkable

first-most would be the now six-weeks-out new album from Insides - Soft Bonds

usually when a favorite band reactivates after a long silence the chances are pretty good that the results will underwhelm

this is a rare example of being fully whelmed - 

it's every bit as good as the classic-for-those-who-know Euphoria

incidentally, the album and single by Insides precursor group Earwig were quietly made available again, in remastered form, a few years ago, and are well worth investigating. 

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more culpable remissitude: also a month-and-a-half young now is Cosmorama by Beautify Junkyards - the Lisbon band's second album for Ghost Box (and fourth overall). Lovely dreamy stuff, you can get a taster here. "We need to bring colors to face these grey times!" says the groop, and it's too true. 

                                       

here's an interview with groop leader João Branco Kyron  - by Bob Fischer (originally published in Electronic Sound).  Among other things João explains where the name Cosmorama comes from: "it was Victorian entertainment, where people would go to see magnified images of exotic landscapes or far-away monuments."

coming soon (next month in fact) is a 7-inch single collaboration between Beautify Junkyards and Belbury Poly in the form of a cover version of The Incredible String Band's "Painting Box." (Perhaps they should also have done Pink Floyd's "Paintbox" for the B-side?)

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less culpably remiss - lukewarm off the press news, a mere three weeks behind release day - here's another waft of ethereal evanescence from  Lo Five, whose run of releases of the last couple of years have been favorites moods into which to sink and trance out. 

"We need to bring greys to efface these garish times!" says the groop, and it's too true

release rationale: 

waiting to return to a life that no longer exists. A prosaic acceptance of living in slow motion. Waving from a distance as familiarity sails into the mist. A world of possibilities slowly folding back in on itself. Looking out of the window listening to a muffled storm. Trapped on an island that's far from paradise. Gazing over the water and contemplating the tranquility of the other side.

God's Waiting Room represents a creative detour for Lo Five, who has temporarily given leave of his senses and usual production methodology in order to explore a sensation that had become more apparent in recent months - a serene ennui, patient acceptance and mild disillusionment. This is perhaps representative of our collective consciousness, particularly for those trapped in the British Isles.

assembled from tape manipulated 78rpm record loops, field recordings, acoustic and synthetic melodies, God's Waiting Room is an experiment in contrasting sounds and an exercise in restraint.

                                         

credits

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finally, what a relief, no remissness required here at all, I'm several weeks early in fact - a new EP by an artist whose 2018 album on Hyperdub I really liked: Proc Fiskal. It's called Lothian Buses (a tiny taste is available here)  and extends the sound and approach of Insula, which I earlier described as "a frisky, fidgety weave of grime / Eski / 2step rhythms with glinting splinters of melody and calligraphic tone-smears that seem to come out of the Sakamoto / "Bamboo Music" / B-2 Unit realm... with  snippets of everyday speech and outdoors atmosphere, seemingly captured on the eavesdropping sly, woven into the fabric"  

Hauntology(+outernational) Parish Newsletter Xmas 2020

(I don't know what's up with Blogger but since they changed the user-interface, I've not been able to embed things from Bandcamp Soundcloud et al. So pardon me for just linking)

A new release from Lo Five - TONIC - reminds me that I most remissly omitted to mention here his July release The Art of Living. Both that and the new batch are chips off the same lustrous-grey block as Geography of the Abyss, which became one of my favorite releases of 2019, and one I've returned to regularly since. Its rain-streaking-down-the-windowpane feel seems to fit this glum, withdrawn year, offering solace and calm. This year's releases build on this special sound Neil Grant has found, which pulls off the same trick as prime Ekoplekz in so far as you sense the coordinates (in Lo Five's case, BoC, Bush of Ghosts etc) but the mood and palette is distinctive - belongs to him alone. 

release(s) rationale(s)

'The Art of Living' is a collection of music I made between the summer of 2019 up to the month of release.

Without going into detail this has been an intense period of personal turmoil due to multiple family health crises and bereavements, plus of course the halting consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.

During this period I have found comfort and perspective in the writings of the Stoic Philosophers, which has inevitably influenced the sounds. Hopefully these philosophies and sounds can offer some comfort to you too.

Stay safe X

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Presenting TONIC: a collection of jams and experiments with no real cohesion or grand unifying concept.

These tracks were, for the most part, recorded straight out of the mixer to a stereo recorder. I did this so I could concentrate on the more enjoyable, spontaneous, creative side of making music, but it also left me in a situation where I couldn't do much to polish them up afterwards - not that I particularly wanted to anyway.

I wasn't sure what to do with these tracks and I wanted to draw a line under them, mainly so i could stop thinking about what to do with them and just get on with my life.

So for what it's worth, here it is - some music I made that soundtracked drizzly lockdown walks on a desolate Wirral beach. Maybe they can accompany your lockdown excursions too. Take care x

Twin town exchange student Mart Avi has a new album of Estonian / Esperanto never-neverpop out in a few weeks time, Vega Never Sets, on Porridge Bullet  - trailed by the gorgeous single "Feather". (You might remember his single from earlier in the year, "Soul Reaver")

release rationale: 

Like a sheet of paper folded into a cylinder holds up to dozens of kilograms, and animated characters defy gravity, ‘Feather’ presents its physique in a gentle manner.

Accompanying the main track are two alternative versions with warped phasing as well as “an ocular version” – that is, a video made using the game creation system ‘Dreams’ on PlayStation 4. Created by Avi and Ivar Murd, the visual saturates the single’s elusive charge with surrealist horizons, serene vistas, and encounters with Jungian dream figures.

 

There's an excellent new album from Fifth World mischief makers Artetetra, in their Babau guise and titled Stock Fantasy Zone.

release rationale:

"Stock Fantasy Zone is a new album by Babau dedicated to the unearthly delights of unconscious reticular motion, wacky 2D shredding and daily side quests. Directly from inside the Stack, finally imagine a zone where all activities are possible but purposeless, all primary objectives are achieved without even moving and the game-logic has finally disappeared leaving back a virtual fauna of forsaken babbling Npc’s and uncharted, yet to be tested stockpiles of maps and levels.

Lofty low poly structures, tentacular mickey-mousing gesticulations, already obsolete sonic ontologies and the unsung age of Dreamcast workfantasy frenzy. All and all, just another day spent testing the margins and edges of the simulation without leaving your Sofa. Don’t wait! Enter the Stock Fantasy Zone!"

A new Artetetra label compilation, Exotic ésotérique Vol.3, is due in December, and there's a beyond-music project being launched involving many contributors, myself among them. 

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Christmas Bumper Issue

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!

Moon Wiring Club cometh with his customary seasonal offering: Cavity Slabs. Like the atypical summertime long-player Ghastly Garden Centres of earlier this year, Slabs is a brisk and beat-driven effort, veering away from the boggy hinterland of ambience and vocal gloop into which much of Ian Hodgson's output this past decade has sunk so deliriously. Focused and concise, the new record  boasts just eight tuff tunes. The reference point this time around is breakbeat hardcore - in moments, I'm reminded of the phat-but-spooky sound of Eon, although Ian says the launchpad for the new direction was actually this obscure tune:



This very very early Moving Shadow track (by a group later and slightly better known for their Rising High releases) first reached Ian's eardrums via an Autechre radio show from many years ago. "It always stuck with me. It’s that mix of beats with ‘anything goes’ sampling and environmental sounds ~ it always makes me think of coastlines... and a sort of grey mistiness."

                                  

The aim with Cavity Slabs was to take a detour round the ongoing overload of rave-replicas, with their neurotic attention to period detail and naked nostalgia, and instead reactivate the bygone playfulness and incongruous-samples-clumsily-collaged approach of the early Nineties, which threw up so many genre-of-one anomalies and half-realised oddments alongside the classic bangers and slammers.
                                     
           

^^^a megamix of three tunes from the album^^^

"I wanted to compose something that reflected the dankness / mystery of fog without it being an ambient drone affair," adds Ian. The name Cavity Slabs comes from a pile of building materials Ian passed on a rainy-day stroll, which conjured associations both of vinyl platters and "limestone moorside and burial chambers". The overall atmosphere and thematic is caught in the slogan "COAX ANCIENT VOICES FROM THE LANDSCAPE" and track titles like "Cromlech Technology" - cromlech being a megalithic altar-tomb or circle of standing stones around a burial mound.



Cavity Slabs is available for purchase here .

But wait... there's more... adding to the Xmas feast, there's a new, radically different version of an old MWC fave: a DL-only VULPINE REDUX edition of Somewhere A Fox Is Getting Married.  "The original album plus 47 minutes of 12 bonus track alternate takes / extended versions / tangentially related nonsense from the vaults circa 2006-2011" including unreleased experiments like "35 Year Sit Down" and the lost "Schlagerdelia" classic "Mountain Men".




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Talking of "grey mistiness" -  remiss have I been in not alerting parishioners to this new release by  Lo Five - Wirral-based electronician Neil Grant.



There's a really nice "mundane mystical" atmosphere to the sound Neil's worked up on Geography of the Abyss - muzzy textures like looking out through a coach window that's streaked with rippling rivulets of heavy rain, or trying to peer through the frosted-glass window of your front door to see who's coming up the path. The vibe of the album reminds me of the sort of trance you can fall into while travelling on a train or a bus, that feeling of slipping outside the moorings of time.


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A record that not only remissly passed without comment from me, but that I missed completely when it originally came out in June - Vanishing Twin's The Age of Immunology.




Triffic stuff -  at times like The Focus Group if based around "proper" musicianship rather than sampladelia. As with their previous album Choose Your Own Adventure, the starting points of Broadcast, Stereolab, White Noise, library music, etc, are still discernible, but now they are definitively on a journey of their own.

‘You Are Not an Island’, ‘Invisible World’ and ‘Planete Sauvage’ were apparently "recorded in nighttime sessions in an abandoned mill in Sudbury"!




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More remissness - alert overdue for the release of the audio element of Andrew Pekler's wonderful Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas  project of last year.



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A recommendation from parish elder Bruce Levenstein



Release rationale:

Mount Maxwell continues his run of 1970s themed releases with a full length meditation on the perceptual experiences of children born in the wake of the 1960's cultural revolution. Highly ambivalent in tone, Only Children marks a departure from earlier MM releases both in its use of acoustic instruments and in a newfound sense of criticality towards its subject matter; the back-to-the-land optimism of tracks like 'Nature ID' in uneasy proximity to the skeptical disquiet of 'Weird Places' and 'Nomad'. 

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Bruce also brings to my attention this effort



Release rationale:

There was a certain something about watching television in the 70s and 80s. The static crackle when you switched on your set. The faint smell of ozone as it slowly warmed up. The chunky buttons (including such flights of fancy as 'BBC3' and 'ITV2"). And, of course, the programmes themselves.

Whether it was HTV's seminal Folk Horror tinged children's classics 'Sky' or Children of the Stones, BBC1's fiercely intelligent 'adult-show-for-kids' 'The Changes' or ITV's everyday tale of alien possession, 'Chocky', the era was bursting with inventive, unforgettable and yes, terrifying shows.

The only thing more memorable than the actual programmes were their theme tunes. The unique talents of Paddy Kingsland, Sidney Saget, Eric Wetherell, John Hyde and many more were responsible for the atmospheric, eerie soundscapes which formed the aural backdrop to our favourite shows. Which is where Kev Oyston (The Soulless Party) and Colin Morrison (Castles in Space) come in. They've corralled the best of today's innovative electronic musicians, and together they've created 'Scarred For Life: The Album', a collection of new music inspired by the terrifying televisual sounds of our childhoods.

All proceeds for this album will go to aid Cancer Research UK, a charity which is close to the hearts of some of our artists, one of whom is currently undergoing treatment for cancer.

Enjoy. And remember: DO have nightmares. They're good for you.

-Stephen Brotherstone & Dave Laurence, co-authors 'Scarred For Life Volume One: the 1970's'. .

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The incredibly prolific and thorough Stephen Prince of A Year in the Country - independent scholar of the rustic eerie and convenor of reliably interesting compilations - has just published a second book.



Straying From the Pathways: Hidden Histories, Echoes of the Future's Past and the Unsettled Landscape is the companion volume to last year's Wandering Through Spectral Fields: Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology. 

How does Stephen do it?!?

More information about Straying From the Pathways here.

Hark at this here Table of Contents!

1. Explorations of an Eerie Landscape: Texte und Töne – The Disruption, The Changes, The Edge is Where the Centre is: David Rudkin and Penda’s Fen: An Archaeology, The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, The Stink Still Here – the miners’ strike 1984-85 – Robert Macfarlane – Benjamin Myers’ Under the Rock: The Poetry of a Place

2. Fractured Dream Transmissions and a Collapsing into Ghosts: John Carpenter – Prince of Darkness, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Village of the Damned, Christine – Nigel Kneale – Martin Quatermass – John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos

3. Hinterland Tales of Hidden Histories and Unobserved Edgeland Transgressions: Adrian McKinty’s In the Morning I’ll Be Gone – Clare Carson’s Orkney Twilight – David Peace’s GB84 – Tony White’s The Fountain in the Forest

4. Countercultural Archives and Experiments in Temporary Autonomous Zones: Jeremy Sandford and Ron Reid’s Tomorrow’s People – Richard Barnes’ The Sun in the East: Norfolk & Suffolk Fairs – Sam Knee’s Memory of a Free Festival: The Golden Era of the British Underground Festival Scene – Gavin Watson’s Raving ’89 – Molly Macindoe’s Out of Order: The Underground Rave Scene 1997-2006

5. The Village and Seaside Idyll Gone Rogue: Hot Fuzz – The Avengers’ “Murdersville” – The Prisoner – In My Mind – Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth Mon Amour

6. Albion in the Overgrowth and Timeslip Echoes: Requiem – The Living and the Dead – Britannia – Detectorists

7. In Cars – Building a Better Future, Peculiarly Subversive Enchantments and Faded Futuristic Glamour: In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway – Joe
 Moran’s On Roads: A Hidden History – Chris Petit’s Radio On – Autophoto – Martin Parr’s Abandoned Morris Minors of the West of Ireland – The Friends of Eddie Coyle – Killing Them Softly – Langdon Clay’s Cars: New York City 1974-76

8. Brutalism, Reaching for the Sky and Bugs in Utopia: Peter Chadwick’s This Brutal World – Bladerunner – J.G.Ballard – Ben Wheatley – High-Rise – Peter Mitchell’s Memento Mori – Brick High-Rise

9. Battles with the Old Guard and the Continuing sparking of Vivid Undercurrents: A Very Peculiar Practice – Edge of Darkness

10. Lycanthropes, Dark Fairy Tales and the Dangers of Wandering off the Path: The Company of Wolves – Danielle Dax – Red Riding Hood – Wolfen – Hansel & Gretel: Witchhunters – The Keep

11. The Empty City Film and Other Visions of the End of Days – Survival and Shopping in the Post-Apocalypse: Day of the Triffids – Into the Forest – Night of the Comet –The Quiet Earth

12. Universe Creation, Spectral Lines in the Cultural Landscape and Reimagined Echoes from the Past: Hauntology – Hypnagogic Pop – Synthwave – D.A.L.I.’s When Haro Met Sally – Nocturne’s Dark Seed – Beyond the Black Rainbow – Mo’ Wax, UNKLE, Tricky, Massive Attack, Portishead, DJ Shadow, Andrea Parker – Ghost Box Records,  The Focus Group, Belbury Poly – The Memory Band – The Delaware Road – Rowan : Morrison – Howlround – Mark Fisher – the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – Adrian Younge’s Electronique Void – DJ Food – Grey Frequency – Keith Seatman – Douglas Powell – Akiha Den Den – The Ghost in the MP3 – Black Channels – The Quietened Village – The Corn Mother

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Now this is a little odd - not only is this here chap trespassing on Hatherley's terrain, he's borrowed his first name too! 




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Finally -  and no doubt this morsel of news has already reached your flabbergasted ears  -  but cor blimey guvnor,  Paul Weller's only going to release a record on Ghost Box! The In Another Room EP is out early next year. And it's actually rather good.