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.
. . .
Hang on a minute
I have a powerful sensation of deja vu.
A sicky suspicion that I wrote exactly these words last year.
Or was it the year before?
Well, I suppose that only goes to prove my point, in a way.
But this August... this August has felt deader than ever, no-thanks to the unrelenting stifling heat, discouraging people from doing anything but sit indoors and sweat.
As our sexton Susan said plaintively the other day, mopping perspiration from her brow as she stepped into the rectory: "has the sky forgotten how to rain?".
The footpaths are cracked and dusty. The grass in the meadows is crisp and brown. The trees have that beat-down sun-struck feeling about them. The birds are silent. Blackberries, ripened prematurely, are already at that bloated, fly-blown stage, too sickly to tempt the rare soul on a stroll across the fields.
Indeed there was some debate about whether this newsletter should be called the Harvest Edition on account of the abnormally early harvest.
"We need rain. On parched soil and souls" - so says Evangelical Focus.
It all brings back memories of the long hot summer of 1976 and the unforgettable events of that season.
I'm talking of course about the village fĂȘte - the dispute about the whittling contest, the dead-of-night vandalization of the exhibits display, that shocking brawl on the Castle grounds between Ralph Knapp and Patrick Hearn, culminating in the burly pair tumbling into the moat (thankfully almost completely dried out because of the drought).
Memories of another long-ago era waft pungently from the first of this season's offerings (dead it might be in the streets and the fields, but musicians and other creative sorts have been busy).
Memories of the early '80s and local musicians like Dramatis and Pride of Passion - late-arriving prog rockers who adapted with surprising agility to the synthpop era (if not in these cases actually making the charts like other musicians who followed a similar arc, such as Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones).
I speak of the new album by The Belbury Poly - Sorcerer, released on the Ghost Box sister-imprint Belbury Music to indicate its divergence from the label's primary soundstream.
Release irrationale:
At the outset of the project, Jim Jupp assembled a palette of instruments and sounds which evoke a moment in musical history when digital studio technology just started to take over from analogue.
Eschewing Belbury Poly’s earlier mid 70s obsessions, to focus on that period around 1983, when artists who could afford it started to experiment with samplers. It was a musical moment dominated by the sounds of Prophet 5, DX7 & PPG synthesizers, Fairlight & Synclavier music computers, TR808 drum machine & Simmons Drums (those ubiquitous hexagonal drum pads) and of course the much-maligned fretless bass.
It’s also an era that’s now seen as something of a golden age for fantasy, sci-fi, comics, book, TV, movies and games (particularly in Britain where it was often fuelled by a post punk reaction to Thatcher’s regime).
In Jupp’s memory these things go hand in hand; as a child his nerdy fandom was soundtracked not as it was for most by Heavy Metal, but by the electronic pop of Bill Nelson, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Japan, and Frank Chickens. Also, by otherworldly TV soundtracks & production music of the era: Elizabeth Parker and Paddy Kingsland at the BBC, The Parry Music Library, Rod Argent’s new age library albums and even Clannad’s Robin of Sherwood score.
Sorcerer is due for late September release
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Also flashing back to the Eighties is the latest release from Fil OK, the final instalment of his "ecclesiastical electronica" trilogy, released under the alter-ego We're in the Water. It's titled The Dome.
Release irrationale:
2026’s three ambitious works have each interpreted the lyrics and music of his new songs literally as architectural spaces, placing them conceptually in these three grand, holy places of worship, celebration and contemplation. Across the past twelve months this musical trilogy has variously explored different facets of the human experience, and The Dome sees Fil delve deep into the universe of spirituality and what lies within its mysterious realms.
Whereas February’s The Steeple explored the mind - how we think, question, imagine and make sense of the world around us - with June’s second long-player The Belltower turning to the body - the reality of living through relationships, joy, struggle and experience – this autumn’s concluding part The Dome completes the trilogy via an exploration of what nourishes the spirit. It's a record all about connection, hope, resilience, compassion, love, and our capacity to keep growing.
The new album’s journey begins with Fresh Air (featuring Carolyn), an invitation to pause, breathe and begin again. From there, Jugglin’ and Tightrope address finding balance in the realities of everyday life, while Desert Island Bed and Permanent Frown explore the idea of facing ourselves honestly and recognising the fears and habits that can leave us feeling disconnected.
The perspective widens with Forty Years On (featuring classical singer Will Eaves) with a string quartet reflecting on what truly matters when we look back on our lives, while the eponymously-titled We're in the Water (featuring We’re in the Water!) celebrates our shared humanity and the wonderfully strange experience of simply being alive. Bankrupt reminds us that compassion also needs wisdom, exploring the importance of discernment and healthy boundaries. Being Eaten embraces the idea that becoming someone new often means letting go of who we've been, while standout track Closer Than My Wife (featuring legendary Vicious Pink / Soft Cell vocalist Josephine Warden) and the epic More Love explore the beauty, complexity and mystery of human connection in its many forms.
But it’s left to the album’s title track to finally bring everything together. The Dome is the place we return to when life feels overwhelming - somewhere to plug into, a well to drink from, a place of renewal, perspective and quiet strength. Not somewhere to escape the world, but somewhere that reminds us who we are before we step back into life with hope, kindness and a renewed sense of purpose.
As Fil reflects, “One of the things that fascinates me most is how strange it is to be alive. Human existence is messy, beautiful, confusing, ridiculous and extraordinary, often all at the same time. None of us has it figured out, yet somehow we're all making our way through it together. That shared journey is, to me, one of the most spiritual things there is.”
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More squarely in the main soundstream of parish activity, a couple of new publications and a podcast series dedicated to all things spectral.
From Reaktion Books, here's the latest in a series of tomes taking the measure of this thing they call hauntology: Jamie Sexton's The Sounds of Lost Futures: British Musical Hauntology by Jamie Sexton (that's the second appearance of that word in this newsletter, and kind of an eerily apt name for a scholar of hauntology to have, since a sexton's responsibilities include funerals, digging graves and keeping cemeteries tidy).
Release irrationale:
Musical hauntology conjures sounds of futures that never arrived: music that reflects on memory and the recent past, drawing on analogue instrumentation, sampling and digital processing to capture how time feels twisted in an age of endless reproduction. The Sounds of Lost Futures offers the first sustained overview of this influential British mode, tracing its emergence, cognate genres and wide constellation of media influences. It also unpacks the conceptual forces that shape it – from nostalgia and retro culture to fractured temporal experience – while covering key artists and labels such as Ghost Box, The Caretaker and Mordant Music. With a dedicated focus on audiovisual hauntology, this book provides new clarity on a musical form attuned to the strange echoes of modern life.
Unconvinced by that "the first sustained overview" claim - A Year in the Country has put out no less than eleven books on the subject, there was this effort by the splendidly named Merlin Coverley several years ago, and there was also Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia by William Burns. And I feel like I'm blanking on one or two other books .... Not forgetting some jottings by yours truly and the Reverend Fisher. So I would say the soil is well tilled at this point.
Also, “cognate genres”!
A slightly stale air also clings to this non-nonfiction publication: the anthology Brutalist Ghost Stories.
You simultaneously think "why did no one think of this before?" and "surely someone already did this?"
From Confingo Publishing, a release irrationale:
‘We live among ruins, surrounded by places built for a future that never arrived.’
Brutalist Ghost Stories is an anthology of seventeen original stories inspired by Britain's brutalist buildings and landscapes.
From grand libraries and university buildings to service stations and closed down car parks, this collection explores the concrete structures which have in their own way shaped Britain and imagines what dwells in them.
Traversing Scotland through to the south coast of England, these stories explore haunting, memory, folklore, loss and the uncanny.
Familiar landmarks become sites of mystery, overlooked corners of our nation's built environment reveal hidden histories and strange encounters abound.
Why no story about our local carbuncle, Tonwell Tower?
Clearly this whole field remains a growth area. Viz, the launch up at the Institute of a special unit:.Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group
Ghost stories are in fact one of the group's subjects of interest:
We can glimpse the gleanings of these researchers through their regular Hauntology Podcast, as amiable and indoor-voice intimate as you'd expect from such a gathering of scholarly kith. It's available via Rephonic, Apple, and other places you might expect, with transcripts offered as well as the audio. Three episodes in, topics include "Spectral Tourism" and "Haunted Writing, Creative Non-Fiction and the Moors Murderers".
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Returning to recent musical emanations...
Well, what a pleasant surprise - a new late-summer release from Moon Wiring Club, an artist I generally associate with the cold, damp weeks leading up to Christmas.
Almost Alive At Morgans Lane is one of Ian Hodgson's irregular delves into auto-archaeology, with a twist: these are not unreleased tracks and alternate takes but live performances, or residues thereof, that have been assembled into a kind of phantasmagoric "live album" that never quite was.
The album is out in a few days time and although a download-only release, it can be acquired in a special package: a "bespoke chunky presentation envelope" containing sundry goodies such as an A6 kineograph "overlaid with fragmented 1985 Microcomputer Soft Command Hallucinations" (yes your guess is as good mine), 8 exclusive postcards, and 4 (out of a range of 40) Curious Quartet Artcards. There are also some other related and semi-related goodies separately available - an Almost Alive Sticker Selection, issue #3 of Catmask , feline greetment cards - but also buyable as a bundle.
Release irrationale:
ALMOST ALIVE AT MORGANS LANE (GEpH020DLX) is quite possibly the cumulative meisterwerk of MWCs ongoing audio reclamation mission / divine calling to conjure up and deftly assemble as much esoteric ODDNUSS inside the most closely packed, yet luxuriously stacked envelope as possible.
Many moons ago, MWC were coaxed from their ephemeral Northern compound by a variety of elegant individuals and highly professional organisations to lucratively perform aLIVE undertaking within a fascinating variety of fashionably showbiz, yet simultaneously clandestine locations throughout the country.
Naturally these MWC performances were instantly and uniformly proclaimed a MASSIVE SUCCESS and soon became the highly sort-after ticket of the season, spoken of with whispered awe and a wide-eyed reverence.
Who amongst us can ever forget the amusing MWC catchphrase quotations ‘In the Phonebook Under Gas’ or ‘On the Never Never’ that artfully proliferated as a welcome secret fever throughout the en vogue vocabulary of the contemporaneous socialite elite.
Now YOU, who understandably were :
denied entrance
unable to locate the supposed venue
not yet sentient
choosing instead to rewatch repeats of Lovejoy
erroneously duped by pernicious rumours viciously perpetrated by the stealth agents of our envious rivals into avoidance
flamboyantly overdosed on Opium derivatives during the proceedings
Can rectify this catastrophic oversight + finally fully submit to Hexperience MWC ALMOST ALIVE AT MORGANS LANE with this highly stylish and unique bespoke chunky presentation envelope ~ jam-packed with HAND-ASSEMBLED interactive mnemonic articles all adeptly infused with occult significance potentiality.
8 tracks of unreleased MWC Musick(e) have been assiduously exhumed and thoughtfully re-spliced from an arcane assimilation-jumble transfer of aLIVE locationals, sound-bored recordings, reassembled rehearsal footage, in situ bootlegs, digital camera memory cards + patented MWC test recovery CDR Disc Rot Technique.
An undeniable RUFFness alongside an omnipresent atmosphere of uncanny malevolence eerily permeate these recordings, which feature aLIVE baked-in beat loopery elaborately juggled with copious quantities of unmoored vocal exclamations, percolated with corroded roomtone reverberations and myriad splintering aberrative atmospheric fluctuations.
Familiar MWC favourites such as Doll Hill House & Tudorbethan Jobbernowl now feature mutating situation deformities, alongside never repeated MWC obscurities such as the distorted machinations of Black Pudding Jacking Zone and the sublime Seance Psychedelia offering Sherry at the Ritz ~ all considerately rescued from the Vault ov ‘Orror by dedicated + discerning MWC archivists for the eternal delectation of future generations.
The resulting 55 minute opus provides a definitive aural totality of what undeniably conceivably occurred when MWC manifested one last time and performed their infamous Psychotopographical Swansong
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Sunday school director Dave Howell informs me that the new record by Lawrence English, who hails from our Australian twin town Woolloongabba, is definitely on the vibe: sonically "somewhere between Vangelis and The Caretaker" and carrying a polemic about "the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures." English's release irrationale refers to a term he's coined, "Acid Nostalgia... a shorthand to describe the de-contouring of the future through a corrosive fixation on a flatten rendering of the preceding times... a certain type of lazy cultural scripting where tropes of the past are presented in the absolute, as empty pictorials; photocopies without any original from which to draw actual meaning, or useful detail."
The album's title is certainly bang on theme: The Rest Is My Ghost.
Mr. Howell incidentally directs us also to a new release by Ukrainian exchange student Regina Collage that if not exactly haunty does waft off halcyon echoes of A.R. Kane - "It Should Be Something".
Hauntology is all over the current issue of The Wire.
It pops up in the cover story on Space Afrika, whose new album Quiet Storm is out at the end of September.
And it pops up again in the lead review for an artist unfamiliar to me: Conflux Coldwell. The album is called Echolalia and it explores the connections between hauntology and autism.
Release irrationale:
"There is a spectre haunting Conflux Coldwell, the spectre of autism."
Bulletdodge is proud to announce the release of Echolalia a striking new electronica album from Conflux Coldwell. Arriving digitally this June, with a vinyl edition to follow in early September, the album Echolalia explores the notion of internal “ghosts” — the lingering traces that inhabit the mind. Sparked by his daughter’s autism diagnosis earlier this year, and his sister’s AuDHD diagnosis the year before, Coldwell was prompted to reflect on his own neurodivergence. The result is a deeply personal and introspective work that interrogates how these experiences have shaped his creative process, his unique perception of the world, and his enduring fascination with machines and hauntology.
Also lead reviewed in that same issue of The Wire is a record that truly can only be described as bringing-up-the-rear when it come to its subject: the spookiness of children's TV of the British 1960s and 1970s: Luke Haines's Izzy Wizzy Let's Get Busy.
"By the 1960s and 70s magick was all over children's television in the UK..."
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Not precisely hauntological but hailing from our Canadian twin town of Port Moody, Realm of Dusk - the new-ish alias of Sam Macklin - have recently released a third album of spacey glitchscapes. It's titled, logically enough, III and comes via the evocatively named imprint Blasted Gorse.
If a title like "Astral Vomit" suggest a secret and hitherto unexpected arsequake influence, other titles like "Bill Evans" and "Solitude Seekers" probably convey the atmosphere more closely. Indeed Matthew Ingram, reviewing at Woebot, uses words like "pensive" and "sidereal" and "funereal". Which last does sound a wee bit haunty.
Another elder of the parish swings by with news of an Extended Play.
Kollidaskope is a hot slab of Ekoplekz homing - or honing - in with laser-precise focus on the exact set of sounds that tickle his audio-erogenous zones. Sensibility refinement as a lifetime's project.
So the opening title track is Rastakraut fastskank, like a dried-up Monolake. Dank 'n' bouncy, "Refrakzion" is like "dub techno" if it meant something completely different. "Dubnauzium" finds the sour spot between "Silent Command" and "The Gospel Comes to New Guinea". "Autoekpression" is Bandalu chasing "Bitches Brew" down a long dark tunnel.
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Overtaken by meteorological events! In between starting the Newsletter last weekend and finishing up this morning, well, the sky remembered how to rain. Susan, the sexton, popped by the rectory on her way back from the shops - her face streaming with moisture, only this time precipitation not perspiration. Drenched to the skin she was and shivering, thanks to the sudden cataclysmic downpour and temperature drop. Dripping all over the newly waxed parquet flooring.
Answering the prayers of farmers and gardeners alike, the heavens have finally opened up.
Perhaps a little too much...
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