Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately.
The combination of all that heavy rain earlier in the year - and the spell of cloudless skies and midsummer heat in late April - resulted in a virulent verdancy I've never seen before.
What did the poet say?
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil
Dancersend was incandescent last week.
And then, the other day, driving past the station and through those four or five fields of rape (such an unfortunate name) I was floored, overawed, by the flaming fluorescence of yellow stretching out in every direction as far as the eye could see.
A vibrancy of hue I've never seen before.
This photo - of a different field, at a less bright time of day - doesn't nearly do it justice.
And of course the bluebell woods - again, so hard to capture on camera, the gaseousness of that peak-bloom purple haze.
So - even though the birdsong is our surroundsound symphony these days - we turn now to musical happenings of note in the parish.
From our Emerald Isle twin town Kilkenny, something really special:
Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology Vol. 3 - The Stray Sod.
The latest - and last - installment of the compilation series documenting this Irish institution for electronic music composers active in the 1970s and 1980s.
But what a way to go out - it's a gorgeously varied selection of pieces, ranging from miniature electronic radio-plays to tone poems woven out of chimes and drones to dulcet folk songs.
You can buy it here either as a digital download or as a compact disc that comes with a beautifully illustrated and intricately informative 70-page book about the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory's history, a pull-out A3 poster of the Ireland Pavilion Expo '74, a Radagast's Allotment Macpaint design by Johnny Donnelly, and a special thank you letter from the Label Director.
Release irrationale:
In this third, and final, volume of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology, we focus on several disparate yet conceptually linked topics, many of which connect to the Kiely cousins, Owen and Tom, who have been briefly mentioned in previous volumes. The first half of the book focuses largely on the foundations which led to the events of the second half. The second half of the book will focus largely on the arts, crafts and lifestyle collective founded by the Kielys, Radagast’s Allotment.
In our first chapter we cover the creation and publication of the 1971 children’s book and accompanying audio cassette Upon the Air. Written and produced by Gerry Duggan and Jacinta Delaney and illustrated by the renowned Irish equine artist Johnny ‘Ding Dong’ Donnelly, Upon the Air, was the first and only children’s book made in the lab. It was intended to disseminate Delaney’s early-years sound studies research to a wider audience, though was a commercial failure.
The second chapter of the book covers an ill-fated, government funded, immersive art installation which had been planned for the Irish pavilion at the 1974 World’s Expo in Spokane, Washington, U.S.A. In this chapter we cover the development of the installation, which was a collaboration between K.E.R.L. founding member, Eoghan Comerford and the Dublin-based artist duo Beamish and Watson. We also explore the government in-fighting which led to the ultimate failure of the project.
Chapter three documents the musical works of the Kilkenny folklorist and composer Maeve Scully (1947-2011), her connection to the Radagast’s Allotment and K.E.R.L., and the rediscovery of her work by a younger generation of composers, musicians and improvisers throughout the world. Maeve would go on to become a key member in Radagast’s Allotment and would frequently make use of the facilities in the Electroacoustic Lab to realise her ‘Mayday Dew’ series of compositions.
The radio adaptation of T.V. Delaney’s, post-apocalyptic ecological science fiction novel The Capsules of Posterity – The Aurochs, is the topic of our fourth chapter. Initially published in ’76 by Tamhóg Press, the book was adapted into a radio play by Antrim Productions and K.E.R.L. It was produced by Tony Quinn, Tom Kiely and Eoghan Comerford and broadcast in 1981. The production process of this adaptation is often cited as the origin for the ideas which later became the formalised Radagast’s Allotment.
At this halfway point of the book, we have included several pages from the first edition of the Radagast’s Allotment Almanac, which came out in the summer of ’85 and was designed by Johnny Donnelly using MacPaint. It gives an insight into the activities and interests of the group, which we will then explore in the second half of the book.
Next, we have an interview which I conducted in a pub in London with the Radagast’s Allotment founding member, Owen Kiely, last year, where we talked at length about Dian Cécht and his band after Dian Cécht, The Triskelion. Owen does not suffer fools lightly, though we have printed the interview in full as it gives an insight into the culture and condition which led up the founding and eventual collapse of Radagast’s Allotment and the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory.
In chapter six we cover the activities of the Radagast’s Allotment, an arts, crafts and lifestyle organisation described by Hannah Sheppard-Noonan, in her book Bards, Binaural Beats, and Borderline Personality Disorder – Mental Illness in a Rural Arts Community as showing ‘all the signs of being a new religious movement, though lacked anyone with basic, never mind effective, organisational skills, which fundamentally prevented the group from fully actualising into a cult.’
Socracht Rothlach, which was a collaboration between one of the guitarists from The Triskelion, Stevie Larkin, and the K.E.R.L. member Packie Bolger, is the topic of chapter seven. The release was the second in K.E.R.L.’s Relaxation Series and was, like most things released by the lab, a commercial failure. In the chapter we cover the process of making the album, its musical qualities and the life and death of Stevie Larkin.
Our final chapter is about Tom Kiely and his group The Small Green Hand, who had splintered off from Radagast’s Allotment in the mid-80s, and who, inspired by Italian Futurists and the Viennese Actionists, attempted to poison a significant amount of the Kilkenny public in an attempt to ‘herald a new Irish techno-feudal utopia.’
Vivere Solem Et Oppositum,
Neil P. Quigley
April ‘26
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The Kilkenny release has understandably and deservedly overshadowed everything else going at the moment.
But I do want to shine a spotlight on some other parish activities that may have escaped your notice.
For instance, those secretive brothers behind Boards of Canada have been shyly, slyly, hinting at a forthcoming release, their first in an absolute age.
It would be a shame if they were so coy about it that Inferno didn't get the attention it probably merits.
Fresh from their epic BoC treatise "Corduroy Psychedelia", Split Infinities has another essay that interpretatively irradiates BoC's teaser releases so far: Boards of Canada’s ‘Prophecy at 1420 MHz’: Spinoza, Bataille, Nasr, and the Aesthetics of Prophetic Transmission -
Susurrations of Cosmic Consciousness or Notes Toward a Hydrogen Communism
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Talking of things getting overlooked... I fear that I missed the Keith Seatman album, owing to the long gap since the last newsletter - Counting To Ten Then Back Againcame out in February and now there is a remix of a track off the LP, "Clip Clop", done by Simon Heartfield.
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Conversely, I am a little early in drawing your attention to a new album by Fil OK, titled The Belltower, and out in June.
Well, not really early, actually - as it is part 2 of a trilogy of LPs released this year, with The Steeplealready out and hearable here, and the final installment, The Dome, due in the autumn.
The trilogy is under Fil's alter-ego We're in the Water and it's sweetly spooky electro-pop in the vicinity of John Foxx and the Belbury Circle
Naturally, I'm all in favor of ecclesiastical electronica.
Although going by the release-rationale, this second installment of the trilogy is less about the ethereal and spiritual and more about the corporeal:
"The concept of the album is how our bodies constantly guide us: through instinct and movement we are attracted to pleasure, beauty, nourishment, relief, connection and survival, and intuitively away from pain, discomfort, danger, excess and the grotesque. These impulses can be gentle or relentless, welcome or intrusive. We call them needs, instincts, desires – but, at their core, they are simply the language of the organism itself. To live is to inhabit this system: to navigate and direct a restless, vivid machine of nerves and muscles as it carries us forward through life.... Where The Steeple leaned into cerebral electronic textures, The Belltower brings guitars and beats into sharper focus, emphasizing the resonance and vibration of bells and twanging guitar refrains on tracks like "Nothing Is Certain But Death", "The Headaches" and "Not Sleepy", as well as rhythm and distortion on "Not Quite Naked" and "Storm Before The Calm" – the latter a dark electro murder ballad inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Lyrically, the new album explores a range of bodily states and experiences - waking, breathing, seeing, identifying, enjoying, suffering, escaping, fornicating, violating, dying and the peculiar theatre of cohabiting...
"The three new works planned for this year each interpret the lyrics and music of the songs literally as architectural spaces, placing them conceptually in these three grand, holy places of worship, celebration and contemplation.
"Whereas The Steeple imagined the mind as a place of elevation and introspection, The Belltower represents the body - vibrating in visceral resonance - tunes and rhythms designed to make the blood flow and the body move."
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Talking of "sweetly spooky" - not really hauntology, and not a new release, but newly nailed to my brain - is year-abroad student Naomi Elizabeth, currently studying Instagrammatology at Pendley Manor Arts Institute, but I for one think she should go back to making tunes like these...
Wet Leg goes hyperpop
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Bob Fischer's latest Haunted Generationcolumn has a bunch of haunty activity, names mostly unfamiliar to me. Like this fine fellow
and this atmospheric, shortwave radio inspired audio-drama
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The supernaturally prolific Stephen Prince of A Year in the Country has yet another book out (how does he do it?! Surely he is now in double figures? My refractory period for a new all-new tome seems to be a decade!).
Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995
Full information about its scope and contents, and how to buy it, is at the A Year in the Country blog.
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A Year in the Country brings us back to where we started - the English countryside, succulently ablaze this month, a vernal inferno
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the parish hall 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 me 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 capture its qualities for myself, a couple of phrases sprung to mind...."Time becomes a quicksand" is one, and the other is "stretchy". As it happens, Ian himself uses the phrase "endless elongation" in the release-rationale below.
These tracks reminds me of the process by which Brighton or Blackpool rock is made: a thick slab of taffy gets extruded out to enormous length, in the process thinning out while still retaining its internal patterning. It's the vocal element, more pronounced and grotesquely deformed than ever, that forms the "lettering" inside the stick of rock that is each sprawling track on Gruesome and Grisly.
As it turns out, the idea of tooth-enamel-eroding souvenir treats bought at the seaside is a suitable thought given that the albums are loosely inspired by coach tours and the sensation of temporal suspension experienced while on holiday. Take it away, Ian:
"One of the main aesthetic influences was what I describe as ‘Coach World’ ~ that feeling on a holiday (or long journey) that you’ve got to spend 18 hours on a coach. At first you think ‘I’m going to snap’ but then after 3 hours you get into a different rhythm and before long (after 8 hours) you kind of can’t remember what life was like before you started the journey ~ hence entering Coach World. What I wanted was music that has something of that endless elongation vibe. Initially daunting, then meditative, then you don’t want to leave and have to listen again....
Another aesthetic influence was the idea of Holiday Memory ~ a fleeting moment of a holiday situation (going around an art gallery for example), where you can remember with clarity (or what your brain thinks is clarity) a specific moment (the angle of the walls, how the lighting looked, spotlights on glass, colours maybe scents or what you were feeling) forever hightened in your mind in a specific way (because you are on holiday) but you have little or no memory of what preceded / succeeded that moment. So you end up with a loop of thought, or a series of loops as a memory of a holiday from 20, 30, 40+ years ago. Over time they might not all even be from the same holiday.... This concept was something that kept popping into my mind as I assembled the music, sort of ‘bursts of heightened memory looping’.
"Sonic Procedure wise, I was getting bored of limited melodic chord changes and wanted something that had a bit of distance from what my standard compositional impulses were. Essentially the majority of the music is comprised of micro-samples (like a snap blast of fuzzy background music on a VHS tape documentary c1982) that are then cleaned up a bit and subjected to endless processes (re-sampling is apparently the key word here). After doing this for several months I had a substantial wonky library of component tune elements that were then deployed in the guiding service of the Gruesome Shrewd package holiday aesthetic.
What I found was that generally the tracks fell into 3 styles ~
a) Sludgy Psyche Rock
b) 80s Corporate Corroded
c) Ambient Slurry (naturally there was also a judicious application of disembodied voices).
I suppose you could say this sort of sound world is Chopped + Screwed (which does sound a little like Gruesome Shrewd) but whereas (in my non-expert knowledge) C&S tends to have that nice thick syrupy sound + big bass + distortion, I’d say there’s something different going on with GS/GE even though some of the production techniques would be fairly similar. It’s sort of elongated chewing toffee bar mids rather than cough syrup mixture lows.
Compositionally I wanted something that sounded different to the more DAW / Electronica aspects of some MWC stuff ~ ‘here are the beats / here goes the bass / that melody works as a chorus / tighten up that bit / move the last bit to the beginning as it has a better hook’ etc. When putting these tracks together, quite often I went against my instincts and instead of tightening things up, deliberately left things more loose and allowed elements to play out / loop for longer...
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Coaches - specifically the rippled patterns of rain streaking down the windows of a coach in motion - is one of the mental images that often comes to 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.
And also collations of work byBernie 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 blogDreams, 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 determinedly pushing into different areas with his Belbury Musicimprint. The 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, Japan, Axxess (whoever the eff they may be)... fretless bass, ebow 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, is 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. The film’s audio aspect also prefigures hauntology (it 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 this newsletter up with my Top 20 Ghost Box releases (including a couple that are technically on another label but still count as GB releases 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 seriess 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.
I saw that American family sitting glumly in the tea room area of the farm shop the other day. Although the dad may actually be a Brit - he’s got one of those grating in-between accents. Passing their table on the way to my favorite nook, I heard him muttering disagreeably about the deficiencies of the bagel that lay forlornly half eaten on his plate. Honestly, anyone with a pinch of sense wouldn’t order a bagel in that kind of place. A scone, a granary bap, a nice white roll, a flapjack…
They do seem a downcast bunch. But I suppose having to move, lock, stock and barrel, in such a hurry... I really ought to make more concerted efforts to integrate them into the community, such as it is. But they don’t look the sort to be making jams or cheese straws for the church fete.
On to other matters....
Well, the big news in the parish is a new album by Position Normal - Modern & Unique 2.
It is indescribably good. Which I mean literally - I can't describe it.
All the quaint creaky crinkled quirkily chuneful qualities of classic Poz Normal (Stop Your Nonsense, Goodly Time etc) meshed with the unmistakably digital-now. A sort of hyper-brite murk, cobwebbed with glinty glitches.
I say that but looking at the press release, the sound palette is all acoustic and electronic, barely digital at all! And there's material, or constituents at least, in there that allegedly date back to the late '80s. Pre-Bugger Sod.
It's a headscratcher
Release irrationale:
All lyrics and stories written and performed by John Cushway. Instruments played here:. Piano (a real one and a software one). Guitars: Aria Pro 2, Yamaha acoustic, electric Italia Maranello, Double Bass, Congas, Bongos, Tambourine (wooden), Shakers (one egg shaped, the others are all made to look like fruit and vegetables). And synths.
2 samples though. One of a dog barking twice and a drum and bass sample from a 90's D&B Sample CD on the last hidden secret bonus track Techno Non-Stop (Party Party Drugs).
Oh and look here - a movie about or involving Position Normal
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Activity from the village elders!
Including posthumous activity... which I suppose is pretty ghostological if you think about it.
Now I remember as a boy cycling past Pendley Manor and slowing to a near-wobble as the big lawn came into view - goggling at the contorted calisthenics cavorted by what looked like naked or nearly-naked figures. Turns out this was the dance troupe of Ernest Berk, an avant-gardist in exile, whose radical choreography was accompanied by equally radical electronic music for movement composed by his good self.
Trunk already issued a chunk of this stuff (Electronic Music for Two Ballets) but somehow I missed the heaping double-CD portions of Berktronica that came out last year via the Huddersfield Contemporary Records label - a bumper serving of the first of these two sorts of avant-electronic that I really really can't get enough of.
Release irrationale:
This double CD represents the first substantial publication of the electronic music of Ernest Berk. Only two works from his catalogue of over 228 pieces were published during his lifetime in the early 1970s. Following the collapse of the Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln in 2009 it was generally thought that all materials were lost. The project team comprising Prof Monty Adkins, Dr Sam Gillies and Ian Helliwell have managed to source early digitisations of some of the master tapes from Martin Kohler (who was a PhD candidate at the time) as well as other sources across Europe. The project team have then selected 18 representative tracks from Berk's oeuvre composed between 1957-1984. They have then worked with Dr Richard Scott and Jos Smolders to digitally remaster these works for this release. The CD features a bespoke cover design by Ian Helliwell and has been produced by Monty Adkins. Extensive liner notes about Berk's work have been written by Adkins, Gillies, and Helliwell.
Ernest Berk was one of the earliest and most prolific composers of electronic music in England and yet his work is almost completely unknown to the wider public. With only a few pieces ever made commercially available in limited circulation, much of his output has since languished in obscurity until now. Huddersfield Contemporary Records is pleased to release this newly restored and remastered 2CD collection of the work of Ernest Berk.
Berk was a true polymath, working throughout his life as a composer, percussionist, dancer, choreographer, teacher, actor, and mime artist, often assuming many of these roles in the same project. He composed over 228 works of electronic music between 1957 and 1984, many of considerable length and often used to accompany his own expressionist contemporary dance productions. Diversed Tapes is a compelling overview of Berk's revolutionary catalogue. The collection includes End of the World (1957), his first work for magnetic tape, and one of the first electronic works composed in England, and Diversed Mind (1967), his work for one of the first public concerts of electronic music in England at Queen Elizabeth Hall and performed alongside music by Daphne Oram, Tristram Carey, and Delia Derbyshire.
Berk's music is at once radical and yet still accessible, rooted in a deep appreciation for melody and rhythm. Listening to this collection in a contemporary context, one cannot help but be struck by how much his music prefigures more current musical trends. Tracks such as Wings Over the Valley of Death (1961) and Kali Yuga (1962) utilise the sorts of dark ambient droning soundscapes that are ubiquitous in electronic music today. Vibram (1973) is a long form electronic improvisation evocative of contemporary modular synthesis performances. Against 7/4 (1967) and Janet Calls it Blue Ribbon (1972) contain the kinds of sophisticated electronic music gestures that evokes connections to later works of acousmatic music by figures such as Bernard Parmegiani. This is more than just a document of the past – rather, there is much to be enjoyed here by contemporary ears with contemporary musical perspectives.
This compilation is still just a small selection of the music Berk wrote during his lifetime, but it is an attempt to illustrate the diversity of his catalogue. Richard Scott and Jos Smolders have worked tirelessly to restore and remaster these, until now, lost recordings to bring out their greatest possible shine, and to allow us to finally throw a light on this important body of work.
More electronic ballet music from the venerable and (like Berk) long-no-longer-with-us Daphne Oram - Beauty and the Beast, a collaboration with the composer Thea Musgrave, made for the Scottish Theatre Ballet in 1969. Released with minimal fanfare only days ago. You don't seem to be able to buy it in solid or immaterial form anywhere - but it's out there on the streamers and YouTube.
Clangers-tastic stuff. From Daphne's heyday at the Institute up Dancersend way.
Standard Music Library seem to be putting out a bunch of vintage stuff, some of it a bit 80's and hyperbright, but some fine work by familiar names like Brian Hodgson, such as this spacy 1975 effort Encore Electronic, a collaboration - or perhaps simple adjacence of compatible works - with a less-familiar name, Reginald J. Lewis.
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Younger elders, if that makes sense - a rare sighting of... but I'm sworn to secrecy. Or rather charged with the challenging duty of alerting without revealing. Let's just say, if you ever h.arked to the waftings of A.R.Kane's fellow-travelers and sprite-children, give a glisten to these emissions from melody snakes. Not really "hauntology" but the next parish over, yet certain to trigger ghostly tremors in the memoradelic sector of the brain for some of us.
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A missive from our Canadian twin town East Gwillimbury!
Tony Price alerts us to his latest project, Requiem For The Ontario Science Centre - self-released on Maximum Exposure and described as “a sonic eulogy to my favourite work of art: The recently shuttered Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, a world-renowned brutalist architectural wonder designed by Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama as a centennial project for Canada. It is a stunning landmark that is largely representative of the post-war utopian outlook that permeated through Canadian culture in the 1960s. Last summer, the Conservative Government of Ontario announced its abrupt, unexpected and controversial closure, a decision that was supposedly based on an engineer’s report warning of a small percentage of roof panels at risk of collapse after decades of neglect.
“Musically, this record is almost entirely made up of synthesizers and saxophones, played by Toronto avant-garde saxophonist, Colin Fisher. If I had to throw you an elevator pitch I would say it sits somewhere between Terry Riley, Fripp & Eno, Boards of Canada and Don Cherry's "Brown Rice".”
Neat parameters and it does actually fall squarely into that quadrangle
The inspirational touchstone and monument to bygone utopianism
God bless and protect Canada and the Canadian people!
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From our Italian twin town Potenza Piscene...
Fast approaching their tenth anniversary of operation, Artetetra (have we reached 6th World Music yet?) release the evocatively titled Crepuscular Elixirs by the German-Finnish outfit Grykë Pyje in just a few weeks time. You can hear most of it already here.
release irrationale:
It has been six years since Grykë Pyje (forest ravine in Albanian) stretched out their high sensitivity feelers for the first time into the greatest of outdoors to bring us fascinating, multilayered soundscapes and introduce audiences to their signature, crystal-clear fifth-world compositions. Working on the idea of using music as a way to pierce the fabric of myths from yonder thanks to a wide array of synthesis, sound superimpositions, patchworking and manipulations, blending hazy shards of experience and imagination, in their fourth LP, "Crepuscular Elixirs", Grykë Pyje spins further adrift from its previous works, trying to increase the level of intricacy.
If recent experiments engaged with the sonification of sacred herbariums and the reimagining of chants and myths from the animal kingdom, for the brewing of their latest musical potion, tracks were built around skew and Oddly-hypnotic resemblances of grooves dodging well-trodden patterns. These bumping and stumbling primal rhythms pervading the album were inspired by the inconsistent pulse and timbrical variety of animal noises: a hammering woodpecker, croaks and ribbits from frogs or the scraping of ants at work. Rhythmic backbones were used as free territory to imagine the entire and alien world around the sounds of this pseudo-fauna.
Indeed Crepuscular Elixirs is an apt title for this bizarre conflation of fiction and natural science, magical miniaturism and microscopic realism. With its bizarre world of supernatural charlatans, hazy incantations and invisible accesses to an impossible bestiary, Grykë Pyje creates sixteen tracks of pure audio alchemy where it’s impossible to retrace the songs’ various layers, rather compelling one to listen to the compositions as a moving thing in its whole. Sounds lift up one another creating texture, mimesis and confusion, incredibly entangled, blurring the line between transmutation and sonic manipulation.
With Crepuscular Elixirs, the duo’s organico-mineral soundscape is sharper and more detailed than ever before. A type of listening requiring allure and curiosity, but that repays with a seemingly endless rediscovery and wonder. Now let this seemingly alive bag of sonic illusions open a new chapter in the excitingly chaotic, fantastic world of Grykë Pyje!
"Potion Seller, I am going into battle and I need your strongest potions."
"My potions are too strong for you, traveler.”
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Here's a recent-ish mix made by Luke J. Murray aka Stonecirclesampler for The Wire.
"The mix is a hauntological blend of washed out ambient, dub and grime, threaded together with samples from horror films and TV."
Tracklist
Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler “Stonecirclesampler Hauntology Primer (Intro)”
Stonecirclesampler “Television Of The Stones (Rainfall version)”
Old Grime White Label “After Leaving The Cliff Overlooking The Pacific Ocean, Rainfall Began To Fall Silently On The Car Roof (Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler version)”
Stonecirclesampler “Save The Stones! (Rainfall Widens The Cracks In The Concrete Slowed Down VIP)”
Superior London Pulp “The Real Occults In The Pubs Of The East End (Wire mix acid edit)”
Old Grime White Label “Untitled 2010 Techno (Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler Fourth Dimension version)”
Old Grime White Label “Rainfall Falls Silently On Concrete Rooftops (Ambient Grime edit)”
Stonecirclesampler “A Bygone Age (Rainfall version)”
Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler “Shivers Of Weird Landmarks, The Time Is Out Of Joint (Outro)”
A postcard from Luke alerts me, and now you too, to a new release:
"Just put out a village inspired 7" single last week called 'Somebody's Found Your Allotment' after seeing a sign for a missing bike outside an allotment gate near where we moved to recently, the title I thought has a sort of weird yet brilliantly funny slightly off-kilter energy! I was going for a bit of an early Ghost Box drift energy, swanning about on a secret allotment with lots of spring rainfall and shivering gloom!"
It's excellent - doesn't really remind me of Ghost Box, though - if anything maybe the train tracky echo-delay after-trails music heard quite early on in Stalker ... meets Burial "South London Boroughs"
Actually Luke J / Stonecirclesampler seems to have had a small flurry of releases recently:
A long track with an even longer title - The Neolithic Stonecircle Near The Record Shop With A Hauntology Section & The Rituals, Traditions, Morris Dancers & Folk Plays In The Village Pub Through The Mysterious Green Door Past The Bronze Age Burial Mound In The Conservation Area With It's Inland Water, Murky Depths & Unseen Serpents
Talking of Ghost Boxiness... here's a Belbury Poly remix of a Keith Seatman tune - brief preview here below but fully available only as a vinyl single viaCastles in Space Subscription Library Singles Club
It's a taster for a new KS album Counting to Ten Then Back Again
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Release irrationale:
Overspill Estates EP is a new four track EP from Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, which delves back into the Your Community Hub sessions to uncover some gems that had been forced off the album.
Gordon Chapman-Fox, the genius behind WRNTDP says “I’d worked on these tracks for the best part of a year, and, in my mind, they were a fundamental part of the whole Your Community Hub project. I was heartbroken when they couldn’t make it onto the album, so it’s an enormous relief to see them come to life here.”
The initial concept for the fifth WRNTDP album was to expand beyond north Cheshire, and dedicate a track to some of Britain’s other New Towns. Being part of the project from early on, these four tracks were dedicated to Basildon, Cwmbran, Redditch and Harlow. To give an idea on how long these things can take to gestate, the opening track "The People Of The Town was performed at the End Of The Road Festival in 2022.
The album cover is an image from the half-modernist, half-mock Tudor houses that were built in Birchwood, Warrington in some of the last large scale building projects that were part of the New Towns.
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FinallyShindig recently devoted a large and lavishly illustrated article, by Camilla Aisa, to the subject of Hauntology, which includes a gargoyle photo of yours truly for reasons unknown, and quotes from Beautify Junkyards and Jonny Trunk....
Why now, I wondered?
Then suddenly it occurred to me that - instead of monumentally tardy, it might in fact be topical and even jumping the gun ever so slightly. For later on this year... it'll be the 20th Anniversary of Hauntology... if not as an emergent sound-zone (you could date that to 1999/1998 - Stop Your Nonsense, Music Has A Right To Children) then as a christened phenomenon...
Some sneaky snaps I took hastily, furtively, while in the village newsagents.
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