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 - Christmas Edition: Moon Wiring Club; Dismal 1970s - Stonecirclesampler + Travis Elborough; Sophie Sleigh-Johnson's Code Damp; William Burns's Ghost of An Idea; Mart Avi + Ajukaja

Season's greetings from "a person of gravitas and insight, who says their prayers, and is sensitive to the potential of mission as 'parish-shaped'"

Very quiet in the parish at the moment. The rotten weather isn't helping. 

On the way home after walking the dog over the fields, coming back along Icknield Way, I did spy a bit of commotion: some new arrivals in the village! An American family moving into Hazeldene, that big house on the corner of Penfold Lane. A grey-haired fellow huffing and puffing great plumes of breath into the cold air as he lugged into the house what appeared to be an endless succession of boxes crammed with vinyl records.  "Don't see many of those these days," I commented cheerily - receiving, for my pains, just a scowl.  I shall return at a less-trying time, with a copy of this newsletter and some mince pies. 

But talking of vinyl, parish stalwart Ian Hodgson has a new Moon Wiring Club long-player. 

Yes, that's right - the LP has an equine concept. 

There's also a new artwork approach - dropping the usual MWC style for watercolour painting. 

Says Ian, "I wanted to steer away from those rinsed-into-the-ground Folk Horror tropes, so gave the whole album a (very) loose Undead Dressage feeling (lots of movement)" 

Sound-wise, this is reflected in a switch from the marshy, ambient quease vibe to a brisker, starker sound that coats the beats in ample spooky space. "Funky" is not a word that generally springs to mind when you think of Moon Wiring Club - unless in its other meaning of fusty and unventilated. But listening to the crisply syncopated beats of Horses In Our Blood, I kept thinking of The Meters. 

On the Hodgson mood board for this project: The Residents's "Jambalaya", the sound design and production design of spaghetti westerns (in particular the Klaus Kinski Gothic Western And God Said to Cain  and Matalo! ) and acid westerns (like The Hired Hand).  

And there was I thinking the inspiration came from the unfortunate incident at last year's gymkhana. 

There's a whole backstory to the record. 

Another fine offering from MWC - buy it here. 

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Talking of horses....  at the Horse Hospital in London this Sunday afternoon, there will be an event called Dismal 1970s, involving parishioners Stonecirclesampler and Travis Elborough, along with telly scholar Sophie Sleigh-Johnson  and neo-pulp writer Tim Wells. It is described as "an afternoon of festive-ish words, moving pictures and performances dedicated to the decade of Smash instant potato, public information films and Evans the Arrow". More details about times and tickets here.

Stonecirclesampler  - also known as Luke J Murray, the figure behind The Iceman Junglist Kru and various other haunty entities working in mutations of nuum and drill and wotnot -  has produced a "special limited edition Dismal 1970s cassette...  a super short run only available to attendees" orderable with tickets and to be collected at the event.  

Dismal 1970s participant Sophie Sleigh-Johnson has a new book out via Repeater.

Now it was only recently, wasn't it, that I remarked upon the under-acknowledged intersection between hauntology and British comedy. 

Here's a whole book inspecting that area: "a sometimes comedic field report that charts an esoteric code hidden within the twin poles of 1970s sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Outlining how past cultural patterns condensate and repeat through technology, time is shown to be a damp condensation seeping through the centuries and out onto the telly. Interspersed with the author’s own photographs, prints, Holsten Pils cans, local newspaper entries and carrier bags, as well as a whole host of other characters, the work seems an antiquarian’s conceit that takes time travel as a metaphoric methodology. This is not media studies; more an allegory of all reality as (tele)visual recorded history, excavating the strata of haunted technology from which the fragile band of code comprising our sense of time is briefly emitted. Drawing connections between incidents of ancient and popular culture, from Mark E. Smith’s lyric— “They say damp records the past”—to Rising Damp’s (meta)physical structure of decay, the book finds damp’s temporal power manifest in everything from alchemy, mysticism, and parish folklore to pulp, Time Team, darts, the local newspaper and, of course, the sitcom. Merging the vast with the parochial, the occult with the comedic, Code: Damp tunes into the weird demands of damp as a time-traveling material at the intersections of comedy, myth and technology, taking all three as serious resources to better (dis)orient the ground we stand on."

Here's a warm endorsement from David Tibet of Current 93 renown: "LUCIFER ON THE BUSES! Code: Damp is one of the strangest books I have read. As well as one of the most evocative, lateral, sidereal... an unspellable jewel."

More endorsements and the opportunity to purchase here

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Another addition to the racks at the local library (note the new reduced opening hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, plus Saturday 10 am to noon). Of course you may prefer to support the author by picking up a copy at Book Nook or order directly from Headpress. 

Release irrationale: 

William Burns's Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia examines the use and effect of nostalgia in the Horror and Hauntological realms. It asks why these genres hold such a fascination in popular culture, often inspiring devoted fanbases. From Candyman to The Blair Witch Project, and Dark Shadows to American Horror Story, are the folk horror and found footage phenomena significant artistic responses to political, social, and economic conditions, or simply an aesthetic rebranding of what has come before? How has nostalgia become linked to other concepts (psychogeography, residual haunting) to influence Hauntological music such as Boards of Canada or The Caretaker? What can the ‘urban wyrd’ or faux horror footage tell us about our idealized past? And how will these cultures of nostalgia shape the future?

Combining the author’s analysis with first-hand accounts of fans and creators, Ghost of an Idea offers a critical analysis of our cultural quest to recognize, resurrect, and lay to rest the ghosts of past and present, also summoning up those spectres that may haunt the future.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Seductive Liar, or Are We What We Used to Be?

Chapter 1: Today is Tomorrow’s Yesterday: The Philosophy of Nostalgia

Chapter 2: The Yearning to Return: Folk Horror and Nostalgia

Chapter 3: The Illusionary Precipice: Found Footage and Nostalgia

Chapter 4: The Longing of the Permanently Lost: Franchise Nostalgia

Chapter 5: An Ethereal Composition of Disjointed Memories: Nostalgia as Catalyst for the New

Chapter 6: The Vice of the Aged: Do They Still Got It or Living Off Past Glories?

Chapter 7: The Enemy of Truth: Is Nostalgia Counter-Revolutionary?

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And finally, Estonian exchange student Mart Avi has a new release out, a collaboration with his countryman Ajukaja, bearing the rather sombre title Death of Music.

You can hear it and buy it here.

It's really excellent. To me it has the feel of  a classic "new pop" album -  in the lineage of Lexicon of Love / Sulk / Penthouse and Pavement  - but a new pop album if it had been somehow made after the 1990s. Perhaps in 2001 - the way it folds in rhythmic ideas from hardcore continuum genres and other dance styles of the 1990s - reminds me a bit of Truesteppers, in moments at least. But the songfulness  and the soulfulness - along with the wayward perceptions and intellectual edge - come more from a Scott Walker or Billy Mackenzie sort of place. 

It's a double album too -  a meaty listen that doesn't flag on the quality front.

Release irrationale: 

Certain albums hit like howling bullets at pivotal moments, tearing open the face of music to reveal hidden sonic muscles and fusing them back into something both strangely familiar and yet entirely unrecognisable. We believe this is one of those records.”

The double album Death of Music delivers 16 crooked vocal pops, some ruthless, others unexpectedly disarming. In some songs, Ajukaja & Mart Avi function like a two-headed saurus swinging its spiky tail to shady pop-house smackers. In others, Ajukaja's serene organ licks descend into subterranean caverns, allowing Avi to float to the surface on their wavelengths and turn his voice into billions of extinct moths, enslaved by the moonlight’s pull. There are songs that face destruction and those that seek to prevent it.

One kykeon rap goes, “If you die before you die, then when you die, you don't die!”. Ajukaja & Mart Avi have embraced this notion to create new music that allows them to thrive in the algorithmic wasteland. 13 years in the making, these 66 minutes are packed with lifetimes of truths you didn’t know you needed to know. They are Ajukaja & Mart Avi – two against death.

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Season's greeting from "a person of gravitas and insight, who says their prayers, and is sensitive to the potential of mission as 'parish-shaped' "

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Harvest Bumper Special: Mordant Music, Ekoplekz, Moon Wiring Club, Boglands, Beautify Junkyards, Polypores, The Radiophonics Laboratory, Fil OK, Robin Mackay's By The North Sea, Keith Seatman; Travis Elborough and Stonecirclesampler; Albion's Eco-Eerie, Fellfoul

August is the deadest month.

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.

But here, in this parish, there's an unusual bustle of activity. 

In the fields beyond the churchyard, I can see haystacks being made... the blackberries are ripening.... 

But I am talking about what the villagers have been up to... indoors… in the seclusion of their cottages and terraced houses, their garden sheds and converted barns. 

The first big surprise of this Harvest season is the return from retirement of Mordant Music. 

 

I honestly thought he'd been quietly taken off to a home, or even a hospice - but no! There's a new Mordant Music recording - KPMM: 20 Signs You Have A Thyroid Problem -  available as vinyl as well as download - a sort of extension of work that all this time he's quietly been doing for legendary library music labels like Boosey & Hawkes and KPM.  This completely unexpected back-from-the-dead release wittily mimics the packaging of KPM and teems with intricately manky miniatures and ominous undersores. 

 Hear here and read the Baron Mordant spiel: 

KPMM: 20 Signs You Have A Thyroid Problem

"When I finally lowered the Mordant Music portcullis after 20 years of sauntering alongside the mainstream I signed off with an EMS-based album entitled Mark of the Mould several tracks from which I re-worked for a Sony/KPM online-only library music release entitled Synthi Spores…during the ensuing C-19 castaway phase I composed a further hefty batch of library-style tunes intended for a mooted album with Sony/KPM, which was looking distinctly likely until my contact there vamoosed and corporate ‘reshuffles’ left the music abandoned and huddled in a folder on my desktop - classic ‘industry’ fayre I've witnessed many times and KPM itself has now moved St. Elsewhere…enter CiS, who had also previously re-released the Dead Air album and an eMMplekz 12” , to resuscitate ’n’ rally my underscores ’n’ jingles with their renowned gusto…myself and Phil Heeks fashioned a classic KPM-style ‘1000 Series’ sleeve and a random web pop-up provided the ad-hoc title (I was searching for raw plugs at the time)…I’ve made untold library tracks over the years for firms such as Boosey & Hawkes, Cavendish, Universal and Pifco etc and these are certainly some of my favourites, running a gamut of dinky styles for adverts, film and Netflix, whatever that means these days…njoi/endure.IBM

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And blimey, but here's Baron Mordant's old accomplice Ekoplekz (remember those incredible eMMplekz records - "spoken turd" meets danktronica?) with a new release titled Dirtbokz.  An excellently clanky 'n' clammy addition to his vast discography, digitally available at Bandcamp  and also as a vinyl mini-LP on Selvamancer. 

Release irrationale:

Ekoplekz is Nick Edwards from Bristol, UK. He made waves in the 2010s with his distinctive brand of lo-fi analogue electronica for labels such as Planet Mu, Mordant Music, Punch Drunk, WNCL and Perc Trax, while also playing live around Europe. In recent times, Nick has preferred to remain a low-key presence, but Selvamancer are excited to have coaxed him back with his first vinyl release in 5 years!

Dirtbokz is an 8 track mini-album that showcases the Ekoplekz sound of now. Recorded as always on four track cassette using hardware analogue synths and drum machines with minimal post-production, the tracks retain a raw immediacy and the dirty, dub-infused sound that he was always known for.

For the Dirtbokz LP, Ekoplekz reaches back to the early acid, electro and primitive rave of his youth, all mixed in a hazy reverb-soaked echo chamber inspired by his love of ‘70s Jamaican dub reggae. ‘Frampton Kotterel’ takes a gentle detour into more melodic, sentimental territory and the set closes with the forlorn acid comedown of ‘Phader’.

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Yet another surprise is an unseasonal release from parish elder Moon Wiring Club, whose recordings I usually associate with things like ginger wine and mince pies. 

But amid the heat haze of the late summer, here is a new bumper package, a double CD entitled Cat Location Conundrum. It's in my favorite MWC mode: disintegrative / entropic / marshland miasma ...  Lots of interesting new-sounding moves being made with the layering of vocals... palimpsest superimpositions... maddening loops (like the nagging "well done" on "Impersonation Party") ....  fresh tricks with echoes and delays... and a couple of coups when it comes to the found-soundbites (particularly love "the electronic music has given me a headache already”) 

Love the new Moon Wiring Girl on the front cover - the slightly severe bowlcut-bob and fringe, the imposing lime-tinted spectacles...  it reminds me of the photos you used to see in the front window of  opticians and eyeglass shops:  models who looked vaguely Scandinavian or Germanic, sporting  "strong statement" frames

 

Buy the album - and the matching tote bag - here. 

Here's a megamix / mega-mush video that Ian Hodgson's made to showcase the breadth of this double-disc delight

And here's his spiel from the MWC website: 

CAT LOCATION CONUNDRUM (GEpH017CD) features TWO HOURS of HEXEPTIONAL MWC Musick(e) both freshly conjured + deftly hextracted from long-form musical experimentations undertaken to accompany the recently fabled CAT LOCATION LP trilogy. 

Rather than predictably collate the existing LP tracks into a standard compilation, the CAT LOCATION CONUNDRUM features 12 refreshingly chic NEW compositions featuring some of the damn-finest MWC musick yet composed / composted! Some tunes almost made it into CAT LOCATION vinyl inclusion but were ultimately deemed thematically / locationally unsuitable / unstable, whilst others were lovingly spliced together from a gargantuan scrapvault of recycled MWC musickal detritus over the course of 10 years. PLUS there are some totally minty FRESSSHHHH 1924 / 2024 cronky-funk ectoplasmic jams to gleefully consume! 

The overall ghostly-chic CAT LOCATION CONUNDRUM atmosphere is of enchanting, malleable, elongated, woozy, dreame-drift musick(e) underpinned by MWC trademarked dilapidated Moth Damaged Beats™ & wavering grainy loops often at their most delightfully precarious, served up with ample helpings of customary corrupted Vox + an exquisite side-order of kaleidoscopically enveloping quagmire electronics. 

Simultaneously operating on the cusp of a lurid, technicolor ambient hinterland whilst fully submerged within a soporific quagmire Slip-Hop interzone, CAT LOCATION CONUNDRUM sees MWC progress even further OWT THERE on their jolly jack jones ~ exploring narrative sonics without a fully-functional genre safety harness whilst subliminally tethered upon a decaying waveform of stylish accessibility. All deployed with unique, slyly mischievous Ghost Party Delirium. 

The myriad sounds of CAT LOCATION CONUNDRUM evoke Edwardian seaside shoegaze reveries c1986, woodland-based Stendhal Syndrome scenarios, Mock Tudor Monorail excursions around Britain in miniature, a Jazz Noir nightclub hip interplanetary Happening, deconsecrated charity shop stockroom arcane rituals and the exquisite bliss of necrotic tissue damage within feverishly ostentatious locations. 

MWC ~ We haven’t forgotten how Musicke should taste. 

And here's some horse's mouth snippets of inside-lowdown, with some arcane-in-the-membrane influences coming into play: 

"A big aesthetic influence is the Top 5 fav 1987 Bergerac episode ‘Winner Takes All’ where a Computercon event is sabotaged + Michael Gambon is a grumpy computer expert + Connie Booth a games programmer. The Gambon character has death threats via exciting early modem international business conferences in his home office ~

"Another influence is the 1994 PC game Magic Carpet, which as I was fairly obsessed with in yon 90s. After you’d completed a level, you could just fly around aimlessly over the beautiful scrolling 3D environment. I still think about this game about once a week, and it’s definitely altered how I perceive landscapes...

The figure on the Cat Location Conundrum cover is representative of a programmer distorting through + peering out from their respective reality into the worlds they have created (including our own) in search of the missing cat programme, and the music featured on the 2CD are sequential locations within this story narrative."  

So now you know....

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Talking of marshy miasmas, o’er  the sea in our Irish twin town Kilkenny, there's new activity from the electronical-archeological Miúin label - Boglands, a reissue of the "seminal 1983 ambient album" by the composer Tony Quinn of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory. *

Check it out at Bandcamp -

Release rationale: 

 “This is a reissue of the seminal 1983 ambient album "Boglands", created by the composer Tony Quinn, who was an integral part of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory throughout its later period. Miúin are delighted to finally reissue this album in its entirety. Remastered from the archived original tapes and approved of by the composer himself. 

At long last we can listen to this music in the way that it was always meant to be heard - with the bass frequencies significantly boosted, a wider stereo image on higher frequencies, and on either a high fidelity compact disc, or as a downloaded mp3 or just streaming it off your phone, who even cares anymore.”

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Portuguese exchange students Beautify Junkyards have a lovely new album of spiderweb psychedelia, out on September 20th via Ghost Box. "The result of 2 years of research, creation, recording and mixing," the new record - entitled Nova  - features celebrity appearances from Paul Weller (!) and Dorothy Moskowitz (of United States of America) among others. 

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a video yet that I can  put here as a taster. In the meantime, hark at the austerely gorgeous Julian House design and check out the official spiel below

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On the outskirts of the parish, Polypores is a resident new to me. The discography is vast and definitely worth a deep delve, but this new record The Album I Would Have Made In An Alternative Universe is really rather special with its rippling folds of analogue synth in ultra-vivid primary colours (very much in line with the palette of the CD cover, in fact).

It's a unique release only available with the magazine Moonbuilding, a periodical  launched by Castles In Space and whose excellent contents are largely the work of Neil Mason (formerly of Electronic Sound) The lastest issue of Moonbuilding is preponderantly dedicated to Polypores - an interview and inventory of the voluminous output to date. 

As your eye may have spied on the cover, there's also an interview with yours truly -  trusty if creaky-jointed verger of this very parish. 

There's additionally a chat with Justin Patrick Moore, the author of this fascinating looking book out now on Velocity Press. 

Not actually from the new album but it gives you a flavour of Polypores.

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Another musician on the outermostskirts of this parish - perhaps resident in the next village along - that I have recently made the acquaintance of is Fil Jones a.k.a Fil OK, who records under various identities (solo and collaborative) in a variety of  retro-electro flavours.

For an entry point into the extensive back catalogue, I would suggest checking out the album Neon Ghost (imagine an electroclash Black Moth Super Rainbow, a giallo-haunted Sally Shapiro) and in particular the track "The Hermitess": the sweetly spooky vibe and eerie vocal processing make it a neighbour to Ghost Box's pop-adjacent waftings like The Belbury Circle / John Foxx tunes. "The Hermitess" is inspired by Sunset Blvd. and features voiceover soundbites from what I'm guessing is the original trailer and the actual words of Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond.  It reminds me in spirit and thematic, if not sonix so much, of  Kraftwerk's "Hall of Mirrors". Another winner on that album is "La Planete Sauvage".   Check out also the album Aeromantic ("Murder of Crows" the clammy and baleful "European Folk") and the more recent cold 'n ' bouncy FOMOLAND.  

No previews available as yet but keep an ear for Fil's chuneful pop-leaning collective We're in the Water and their October album She Fills The House With Fire - especially the eerie processed vocal lattices of "Manipulation" and "In the Dark".

What do they get up to in the Institute?  Well, it seems we'll finally get a sense of the scope of their esoteric research with the release of By the North Sea, due September 13 on Hyperdub's sub-label for spoken-word soundscapes and audio essays,  Flatlines.  The work of Robin Mackay (Ccru / Urbanomic) and embarking from an unfinished project of his and Mark Fisher’s, it comes as a CD hardbound with a 48 page illustrated book, but will also be available in digital form.  Buy it here or via Bandcamp.

Release rationale: 

Following on from Mark Fisher & Justin Barton’s On Vanishing Land and Kode9’s Astro-Darien, the third release on Flatlines, Hyperdub’s sub label for audio essays and sonic fiction, is By the North Sea by Robin Mackay, philosopher and founder of the UK publisher Urbanomic.

The project is a sonic exploration of the perplexities of time, disappearance, and loss, channelled through the fictions of H.P. Lovecraft, the speculative mythos of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), and the ghost of Dunwich—a once prosperous English trading city now lost almost wholly to the sea.

Described by Mackay as a ‘radio play afflicted by ontological rot’, the audio essay interweaves field recordings, recovered video footage, voice performance, and original music. The voices of Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, actors Peter Marinker and Phyllida Nash, Angus Carlyle, Lisa Blanning, diver Stuart Bacon, and Morgan Caines of Dunwich Museum, loop and twist around Mackay’s narration in a dense, multi-levelled sonic hyperstition that lends itself to repeated listening.

Mackay began writing By the North Sea in 2017 in the week immediately following the death of Mark Fisher, returning to the archives of a project that he and Mark had embarked upon in 2001, with the themes of the original ‘Dunwich Project’ taking on a new character in the wake of Fisher’s death, and becoming a device for asking questions about finality, about things that could now never happen, about the possibility of continuing, and about a distanced friendship marked by depressive absences and constantly deferred promises to spend time together.

The ‘definitively unfinished’ version of a project that does not, has not, and never will exist, By The North Sea tells of the search for a mode of time where nothing passes definitively and everything can, with the correct procedures, be accessed, re-synthesised, and recast. In a series of resonating narratives across different moments in time (1949, 1968, 2001, 2017), characters including anthropologist Echidna Stillwell, time-travelling professor Randolph Templeton, Lovecraft, and Fisher and Mackay themselves emerge and are submerged in turn, swirling continually around the conceptual figure of Dunwich, as their search takes on the character of a repetition compulsion–a collective return to the site of an impersonal trauma.

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Also out this month, a new album by Keith Seatman, veteran purveyor of "Musical Oddness & Wistful Tootling".

 

Release rationale: 

a skip and a song to see us along is the 8th album by Keith Seatman and his 1st non-Castles in Space album release since 2017. Castles in Space will be releasing a new LP from Keith in Feb 2025 and a 7inch remix single in late 2024.

In the meantime this release is a collection of 10 new tunes featuring more of his Odd Electronics, Psych, Radiophonics, Drone, quirky melodies, samples and random thoughts. Douglas E Powell joins Keith again and supplies Acoustic Guitar on track 10 jumbled letters.

Portsmouth based Keith Seatman was a founder member of 80s-90s indie band The Psylons. Over the last 13 years, Seatman has released seven solo albums (two LP’s and one 12inch single through Castles in Space) and three EP’s (The Broken Folk EP in collaboration with Jim Jupp Ghostbox Records). He has developed a unique style of unsettling electronica rooted in a very British sort of electronic psychedelia. 

In the absence of a video for the new project as yet, here's an older one for a track which uses the same sinister-old-lady sample as long long ago used by Moon Wiring Club… “keep to small… avoid large places”.

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Thanks for the MEMOREX - that's the name of a collaborative tape made by writer Travis Elborough and Stonecirclesampler (aka Luke J. Murray, maker of aunterlogikal ardkore and ghostly-grime for a while now under aliases including Iceman Junglist Kru, Grimescapes, Nunton Experimental Complex, and Old Grime White Label).

On MEMOREX, Elborough narrates a spoken-word piece, in continuity presenter tones reminiscent f that Thames TV announcer  Mordant Music dragged out of retirement for Dead Air; Stonecircle wafts a a spectral electronic backdrop, starting with a wonderful dilation of the old HTV ident theme into a spacy psychedelic drone. 

The cassette will shortly be available through The Tapeworm label via Bandcamp . 

That organisation seems to be the instigator of haunty-aligned happenings at London spots like Cafe OTO and Horse Hospital. 

Like this one from last week involving Elborough and Stonecirclesampler along with a "rare screening" of Burning Pool - co-created by a member of Hula, it's "a hauntological portrait of post-industrial Sheffield that explores the idea of future ghosts inspired by the DIY ethic of the steel city’s music scene between 1979-81",  

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Somehow missed (must have been when I was holidaying in Broadstairs) this early-summer release from Belbury Poly - a collaborative project with Mulgrave Audio titled  Fellfoul.

Spiel: 

Mulgrave Audio presents FELLFOUL an audio drama by Andrew Orton, starring Aja Dodd, with soundtrack by Belbury Poly

On 10" Vinyl, Fellfoul comes with A4 John Ridgeway comic book art and a code card for a Download that includes the includes full audio drama (Parts One and Two) plus an instrumental version of the original score by Belbury Poly and a PDF of script.

The Grand Witengamot of Fellfoul invites Eleanor Wood to its weekly gathering at Jenner’s Field, by the grace of Edwin of the Chambers…”

How has Eleanor Wood never heard of Fellfoul? This 1983 fantasy film was shot in the field outside her house, and devotees of the original 1970s book series gather there every Sunday. Or so they claim, anyway. Eleanor has never noticed them before.

Strangely drawn to this obscure fictional world, Eleanor is lured from her depressing home life by the temptation of medieval swords and sorcery. But is her burgeoning fandom becoming all-consuming? And are the boundaries between fact and fantasy getting dangerously blurred? After all, there’s a Dwimmorim beneath her bedroom window. And Vermithorn the dragon is preparing his attack…

The single page comic book poster in the spirit of children's TV mags like Look-In, was illustrated by John Ridgeway. A veteran of UK and US comic book art, possible best known for his work on DC comic's Hellblazer and 2000AD's Judge Dredd.

Here's another Mulgrave Audio project, involving Bob Fischer of the Haunted Generation  - Simon Perkins's Lurgy

Is that really how "lurgy" is spelled? I always thought it was "lergy" for some reason.... 

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What do they get up to in the other Institute? The one up the far end of Miswell Lane? Here finally  is the fruit of the evidently arcane research going on up there.  Published by Temporal Boundary next month..,

Not sure about that font... or the coinage "eco-eerie"... but it looks interesting. Feel the spiel:

In Albion's Eco-eerie: TV and Movies of the Haunted Generations Phil Smith takes us through a selection of weird films and TV shows and uncovers a wholly unexpected ecological and political message. Unlike most approaches to folk horror or hauntology, we are interested here in an alternative reading; one that attends to the unhuman characters, the materials and the edgeland spaces. A hobgoblinology.

"It is a bold book that takes the weaving path of blood, trauma and sensuality away from Folk Horror and fashionable "hauntology" into new, enchanted spaces. Digging up and doubling down on messy ideas and demon lovers that exist not to elevate us to transcendence but to immerse us in the mud of grotty instinct." - Stephen Volk, author of The Dark Masters Trilogy and Ghostwatch

Albion's Eco-eerie invites us to side with the goblins and the exploited mutant hordes. It provides an essential guide for future living on a coming Planet B.

Films and TV shows discussed:

Night of the Demon

The Maze

The Company of Wolves

The Quatermass Xperiment

Quatermass 2

The Strange World of Planet X

Fireball XL5: 'Plant Man from Space'

Quatermass and the Pit

O Lucky Man!

The Changes

Children of the Stones

Whistle and I'll Come to You

A Warning to the Curious

The Lovecraft Investigations (podcast)

Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II

The Girl with All the Gifts

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Apropos of nothing, an image tweeted by Vic Reeves a few months ago  

That gave me a right Martin Parr twinge, that did. And all of sudden,  R&M started to seem like parish forefathers. 

More to say on this... 

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My, my.... goodness me... surveying the extraordinary busyness in the parish this month and next...  I must say that two things fill me with quiet pride in this deadest of dead August weeks.

Firstly, the warm glow of vindication in the little matter of M.I.A.'s political acumen. 

And second... while it's become something of a backburner interest for me  personally, I take great pleasure in the persistence of H-ology as a field of activity. Coming up on the next-year horizon is the 20th Anniversary of Ghost Box.... but these pastures have been cultivated for longer than that, when we consider Boards of Canada, Position Normal, Broadcast (which reminds me I clean forgot to include here the wonderful demos unearthings: Spell Blanket and the soon-come Distant Calls). 

A quarter-century-plus of haunty goings-on!

Some deemed it a mere fad, a critics's fancy or phantasm... 

But the artists and the fans quietly, steadily, pursue their obsessions. Releases, books, events... 

There's a bustle in the hedgerow... in the spinneys and the copses...  up in the bracken-covered commons... and in the grounds of the Institute(s). 

Cover of the lost Boards of Canada mini-LP Autumn's Bounty

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* Give-the-game-away addendum to Tony Quinn's Boglands: 

"This album is part of the ongoing music series - Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology by the composer Neil Quigley, which attempts to preserve the fictional history of a small composer community based in rural Ireland which ran from the late 60’s until the late 80’s. It is set in a parallel version of Kilkenny which is dealing with modernisation and the seeds of what would become the Celtic Tiger."