And this got me thinking about the proximity of hauntology and comedy - more precisely, a certain strain of British comedy...
Now, on account of some of the write-ups the H-zone gets - the droves of dissertations even now being written on this area - it's easy to come away with a sense of H-ology as this rather sombre and gloomy thing. Especially if you go with the Fisher-ian take with its focus on Burial / The Caretaker* and things adjacent like Disintegration Loops and The Sinking of the Titanic and all that. Lost futures, decaying memory, cultural entropy et cetera.
But, as anyone who really knows the area knows - and who has a wider sense of what it is - hauntology is actually riddled and addled with whimsy and macabre humour. When you listen to and look at the graphic presentation of what I consider to be the canonic core - Ghost Box, Mordant Music / eMMplekz, Moon Wiring Club, Position Normal - comedy runs through the whole thing.
And I'm not just talking the album art and the song titles and the samples - rather often the music itself has an antic air.
(Same goes for the sources too actually: whatever else it is, TheWicker Man is also a comedy).
(Think also of the "sinister camp" flavor of The Prisoner.... Kafkaesque yet absurdly English.... deliciously over-thesped)
(Or the Dr. Phibes movies)
So partly it's to do with the source material... and partly the proximity to pastiche and parody in a lot of the work... and then there's the element of retro-satire in something likeScarfolk, or the early records by The Advisory Circle.
I made this point in the sleevenote for the Ghost Box tenth-birthday compilation In A Moment:
One of the things some people don’t seem to get about Ghost Box - and perhaps they’re thrown off by the name - is that this isn’t meant to be some hair-raising, soul-harrowing trip into necromantic darkness. It's much gentler than that, a twisting or tinting of the everyday. Softly spooky, sweetly creepy, Ghost Box enfolds the listener in a cosy unease. It’s umheimlich you can live with, live inside. No, we are not dealing with Gothshit or pierced-dick second-wave industrial shlock here. Yes, humour is involved: in the artwork, the song titles, the fabric of the sound itself, with its queer mix of solemn and jaunty. A humour of a particular poker-face kind that reminds me of old dear comrades from long-ago campaigns of mischief and obfuscation. That’s a personal resonance, but it illustrates a wider public fact: the existence of an Anglo-Surrealist continuum that crops up repeatedly across the generations, based each time around slightly different constellations of esoteric erudition and arcane research.
So anyway, all this got me thinking about it from the other side - what about actual comedy on the telly that has haunty undercurrents? Britcoms that are fellow travelers with Ghost Box et al.
Way back when, there was Victor Lewis-Smith’s Buygones for Club X on Channel 4 - these were standalone mini-programmes (later a newspaper column) focused on obsolete gadgets and quaint appliances, once-popular toys, fads, and foodstuffs, dead media and forgotten TV personalities, etc etc... Things like the Spirograph, candy cigarettes, the Stylophone, Frank Bough ... An early example of retro-futurism.
Then there was Vic Reeves' Big Night Out.
Now I must admit, when I saw the first episodes I disliked it intensely (see the negative review at the end). But about six shows in, I realised my grave error - the moldy-old all-too-English stagnant odour that I initially found suffocating was actually the source of its musty genius (The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer indeed). I don't know if it is quite hauntology but it nourished itself on similar decaying culture-matter.
Then, by the early 2000s, we have Look Around You, series 1 and series 2 - quasi-pedagogic retro-TV that could not be more congruent with the Hauntology Project. There's even an episode about ghosts!
"in today's modern world"
What else?
Blue Jam, in moments (there was an album on Warp wrapping blackest-ever-black humorous sketches in creepy ambient IDM)
More recently, some of the episodes of Inside No. 9 are straight out of the H-zone. There's one, "Mr King", that is very much ripping off The Wicker Man.
The Mighty Boosh had retro-fantasia aspects that connects to that side of hauntology that imagines musical counterfactuals and alternative history trajectories for pop.
I also think of Detectorists as on the outskirts of hauntology… not quite bucolic horror but a sense of the past inside the present...
Whoever did these fake Penguin / Pelican / Puffin paperback covers for the show is picking up on the same thing I am...
Not having lived in the UK for the last 30 years or so, I have missed much. So I decided to ask a few people who might have a better sense.
Neil Quigley of KilkennyElectroacoustic Research Laboratory grew up in Ireland but has been exposed to much of this stuff. He told me that Reeves & Mortimer were actually a formative influence on what he does, especially their later stuff (which I had never heard of) like The Weekenders and Catterick, describing them as "tonal companions to Scarfolk and more like art school projects than the prime time TV stuff they did"
Neil also pointed me towards Garth Marenghi's Dark Place - another one I'd never heard of.
He also mentioned Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom as a non-Brit counterpart
And This Morning with Richard Not Judy (again, never heard of it)
He pointed to a series called Mammoth and said "there was enough in there to make me wonder if he was
a Ghost Box fan".
Any more for any more?
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And here's my Vic Reeves pan - I think it hones in on an essence that is proto-hauntology and in that sense the review provides a hauntology critique long before any one in the 2000s mounted their critiques of it - the need for some force of newness to blast open the windows, let the stuffy air out
Meat paste did, in fact, figure in a later episode of VR'BNO
* Not that The Caretaker is devoid of humour - even when confronting the most terrifying prolapse of consciousness, there's flashes of dark wit. But also the pre-Caretaker identity of James Kirby - V/VM was all about puerile laffs and icono-vandalistic glee. The butchering of middle-of-the-road entertainment as perpetrated via the CD-R series Offal reminds me of the kind of malarkey we got up to as kids - defacing Ladybird books and other innocent childhood books, adding obscene addenda to the pictures, inserting foul utterances and actions in the text. Or at a slightly cleverer level, parodying things like Stars Wars or the Famous Five.
"The future fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like." - Fredric Jameson, 2015
"The return to history everywhere remarked today… is not a return exactly, seeming rather to mean incorporating the 'raw material' of history and leaving its function out, a kind of flattening and appropriation"
-- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991
"Randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles.... the 'historicism' of the new painting [enables] its secession from a genuine history or dialectic of stylistic evolution, 'frees' it to recover painting styles... as a sort of objet trouve... an omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for all the styles and fashions of a dead past"
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991
"A gleaming science-fictional stasis in which appearances (simulacra) arise and decay ceaselessly…. The supreme value of the New and of innovation, as both modernism and modernization grasped it, fades away against a steady stream of momentum and variation that at some outer limit seems stable and motionless… Where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, nothing can change any longer…. If absolute change in our society is best represented by the rapid turnover in storefronts…. it is crucial to distinguish between rhythms of change inherent to the system and programmed by it, and a change that replaces one entire system by another one altogether"
-- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991
"[Spectrality is that which] makes the present waver: like the vibrations of a heat wave through which the massiveness of the object world--indeed of matter itself--now shimmers like a mirage.”--Fredric Jameson
Saw this around and about and so much wanted it to be real - to be an actual existing, gigging tribute band - that I have not done due diligence, in terms of checking it is not just an AI whimsy.
If it is real, then is this the birth of a new genre of tribute group - the hybrid tribute band?
Any other known examples of this kind of retro mash-up?
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I liked Sigue for the duration of that first single.
In The Guardian, Simon Priceargues that "Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history"
Good point about the reductive idea of working classness wielded by those fans who accuse naysayers of being snobs:
"Oasis have been presented as the true voice of the council estates from the very start of their career. But what of their less stereotypical, but equally working class, 1990s contemporaries? Don’t they count? No band was more aware of class politics than Sheffield’s Pulp, for example, but Pulp were arty and sang about outsiderdom and dressed like Oxfam dandies instead of Arndale Centre townies, so they’re considered somehow less “real” than their Mancunian peers. Meanwhile, the Manic Street Preachers are as working class as they come, but refused to conform to lads-lads-lads cliches, played with androgyny and homoeroticism, and wore their (state) education on their leopard print sleeves."
Sharp too on how the failings of the music might ultimately be decisive, more so than the retrograde attitudes of Noel and especially Liam....
"We’re all familiar with the concept of separating the art from the artist, though everyone’s mileage varies on where to set the line in the sand. But the art needs to at least be good. Oasis, memorably described by the late great Neil Kulkarni as the “English Rock Defence League”, offer nothing but a sludgy, trudgy, brontosaurus-bottomed waddle, perfect for that adult nappy gait so beloved of their singer and fans. Lyrically, too, they’re dismal... dull platitudes that might as well have been written by AI. But the problem is the music. Oasis don’t do fast songs. Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s funkless, sexless plod is always carefully pitched below the velocity at which fluid dynamics dictate that you might spill your lager. Is there anything more useless than a rock band that doesn’t rock?"
Liam, seven years ago, on what they'd be doing if they'd never split up.
"I guess we'd still be making good albums. And just doing the fuckin' same thing on loop. I hate all these cunts that try to reinvent the wheel, 'oh we need to go jazz fusion', with rap and all that. Fuck off - get Faces down your neck, Pistols - just do that on loop. It's great. Why you want to fucking change it? Bit of fucking lager thrown in, and a couple of spliffs and that, and a couple of cheeky ones and that. Fuckin' great!"
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I have softened slightly towards Oasis, at least compared with back in the day when I wrote real-time diatribes as caustic as Price and Kulkarni.
Liam is an empty-headed arse, but whenever I read an interview with Noel, or see him in a doc (like the Hipgnosis one recently) I can't help warming to him: he's funny, acerbic, sharp within his delimited range.
The thing that gets me about Noel G - about Oasis as a whole - is that they are so uninterested.
Not uninteresting. Uninterested. They appear to have zero interest in anything outside of an extremely circumscribed area. Musically, obviously. But in all ways and all things.
A long time ago, I read a piece where Noel was talking about his favorite book - the book that was always by his bedside. Revolution In the Head: the Ian Macdonald book that goes song by song through the Beatles career, using a variety of prisms layered on top of each other... musicological, key changes and scales and chords; what happened in the studio with the production and engineering and experimenting with technology; lyrical inspirations; individual biographic arcs; internal band politics and emotional conflicts; the nitty gritty of collaboration and who contributed what; social and cultural and political contexts; external artistic influences and inputs. Not every song can support that level of exegesis, there are trifles and throwaways. But the entries on "A Day In the Life" or "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Revolution" or "I Am the Walrus" are probing panoramas, gyrating around the song and its creators from every conceivable angle.
I was quite impressed that Noel loved the book. Ian Macdonald was a serious intellectual, a polymath, and Revolution is a rich, dense read. The opening essay on the 1960s and what they meant is a definitive take.
But then I thought: Noel's reading this book, picking it up again and again, rereading the entries on his favorite songs.... it's like a Bible to him.
Reading it, doesn't he ever feel.... ashamed?
Ashamed of his own incuriosity, compared to his idols. Who, as the book amply demonstrates, checked out and explored and experimented with just about everything that was happening and that was in vogue in the Sixties - musique concrete, Indian classical music, Eastern spirituality, the latest trends in visual art, cinema (I just picked up Revolution In The Head and there's a bit where McCartney has the gall to play his little art movies to Antonioni, in town to film Blow Up!).
Not that I've read every, or even many, interviews with Oasis but I've never seen an indication they are interested in anything at all apart from music - and even then only an extremely narrow furrow of canonical rock-as-it's-supposed-to-be. The loop-the-loop stuff that Liam refers to in the video above.
In that sense, they are a steep decline even from The Stone Roses, who did have interests in art and politics (and in music beyond the straight-white-line of the Brit canon), who were widely read and liked to argue about serious things.
Oasis are the Beatles - if the Beatles were just about the tunes and nothing else at all.
Except the tunes aren't as good or as differently, variedly good - there's nothing as odd and unsettled as "She Said She Said" .. nothing that approaches the vertical (an Ian McDonald term - Lennon's tunes are horizontal) melodic grace of Paul McCartney.
Oasis are the Beatles - if they were all Ringo, then.
Except
none of them are as open-minded as Ringo, who gamely contributed to the
most experimental things the Beatles did, and usually rose to the occasion and then some - like the drum track to "Tomorrow Never Knows" or his playing on "Rain", or "Strawberry Fields Forever"... or the steal-your-breath beat on "Come Together"…
And that analogy falls down even further when you realise Oasis have never had a drummer as good as Ringo either. They've never shown any interest in rhythmic invention; the drums are always buried deep in the soundmush, subordinated, menial… seemingly with no function beyond marking time. There are drums on these records only because rock bands have drummers in them.
Oasis are the Beatles if none them were Ringo even.
For all their limitations, they have about four or five great songs that nail one feeling exactly, the invincibility of youth. "Live Forever"...
"Champagne Supernova" is the One for me. I couldn't help falling for that one even as I wrote a disapproving piece on Oasis and Blur for The New York Times, around the time of Morning Glory and The Great Escape).
On some visit to England many years later, when I'd been sent to do a story so I was staying in some fairly central hotel, I was woken by the sound of a drunken bloke hollering the chorus to himself as he staggered along the street below Yes, I thought: it's a song purpose-built for those times you are so so wrecked and you feel like no one else in the entire world is having this much fun. A song for people who say things like "we are such fuckin' legends" .... as they engage in the standard excesses... the stuff that people do each and every weekend... that are being replicated all over the country at that very moment.
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Rock counterfactuals:
#1. After "Setting Sun" - freakbeat reinvented for the '90s, the most exciting thing Noel G ever participated in, contributing some decent lyrics too - he decides that Oasis are tame, lame stuff and joins up with the Chemical Brothers permanently and they form a rave'n'roll supergroop, scoring #1 after #1 and changing the whole direction of post-Britpop rock.
(What would the supergroop be called?)
#2. In our reality, luvdup Hacienda-regular Noel is enthused enough to make a few stabs at acid house. But the tracks come to naught and he gives up and goes back to the Rock Trinity of Verities: Tunes, Attitude and Guitars. (While keeping some sort of remnant of the mass uplift and druggy togetherness - Oasis concerts as raves for the technophobic, Knebworth as Tribal Gathering without the diversity, conservative rather than future-facing).
But what if the acieeed attempt went well? If he'd found some suitable accomplices and went down the 808 State path?
( Another counterfactual is the one in which Shane MacGowan, similarly Shoomed-up, manages to persuade the rest of the Pogues to do a 20 minute acid house track called "Get Yourself Connected". In this reality, Shane badgered them to do it - “it sounds great when you’re on E” - but they weren't having it.)
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.
"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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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
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. *
“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 Universeis 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 albumAeromantic ("Murder of Crows" the clammy and baleful "European Folk") and the more recent cold 'n ' bouncyFOMOLAND.
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”.
Thanks for the MEMOREX- that's the name of a collaborative tape made by writerTravis 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.
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 withMulgrave AudiotitledFellfoul.
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.
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 Boundarynext 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."
