Season's greetings from "a person of gravitas and insight, who says their prayers, and is sensitive to the potential of mission as 'parish-shaped'"
Very quiet in the parish at the moment. The rotten weather isn't helping.
On the way home after walking the dog over the fields, coming back along Icknield Way, I did spy a bit of commotion: some new arrivals in the village! An American family moving into Hazeldene, that big house on the corner of Penfold Lane. A grey-haired fellow huffing and puffing great plumes of breath into the cold air as he lugging into the house what appeared to be an endless succession of boxes crammed with vinyl records, "Don't see many of those these days," I commented cheerily - receiving, for my pains, just a scowl. I shall return at a less-trying time, with a copy of this newsletter and some mince pies.
But talking of vinyl records, parish stalwart Ian Hodgson has a new Moon Wiring Club long-player.
Yes, that's right - the LP has an equine concept.
There's also a new artwork approach - dropping the usual MWC style for watercolour painting.
Says Ian, "I wanted to steer away from those rinsed-into-the-ground Folk Horror tropes, so gave the whole album a (very) loose Undead Dressage feeling (lots of movement)"
Sound-wise, this is reflected in a switch from the marshy, ambient quease vibe to a brisker, starker sound that coats the beats in ample spooky space. "Funky" is not a word that generally springs to mind when you think of Moon Wiring Club - unless in its other meaning of fusty and unventilated. But listening to the crisply syncopated beats of Horses In Our Blood, I kept thinking of The Meters.
On the Hodgson mood board for this project: The Residents's "Jambalaya", the sound design and production design of spaghetti westerns (in particular the Klaus Kinski Gothic Western And God Said to Cain and Matalo! ) and acid westerns (like The Hired Hand).
And there was I thinking the inspiration came from the unfortunate incident at last year's gymkhana.
Talking of horses.... at the Horse Hospital in London this Sunday afternoon, there will be an event called Dismal 1970s, involving parishioners Stonecirclesampler and Travis Elborough, along with telly scholar Sophie Sleigh-Johnson and neo-pulp writer Tim Wells. It is described as "an afternoon of festive-ish words, moving pictures and performances dedicated to the decade of Smash instant potato, public information films and Evans the Arrow". More details about times and tickets here.
Stonecirclesampler - also known as Luke J Murray, the figure behind The Iceman Junglist Kru and various other haunty entities working in mutations of nuum and drill and wotnot - has produced a "special limited edition Dismal 1970s cassette... a super short run only available to attendees" orderable with tickets and to be collected at the event.
Dismal 1970s participant Sophie Sleigh-Johnson has a new book out via Repeater.
Now it was only recently, wasn't it, that I remarked upon the under-acknowledged intersection between hauntology and British comedy.
Here's a whole book inspecting that area: "a sometimes comedic field report that charts an esoteric code hidden within the twin poles of 1970s sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Outlining how past cultural patterns condensate and repeat through technology, time is shown to be a damp condensation seeping through the centuries and out onto the telly. Interspersed with the author’s own photographs, prints, Holsten Pils cans, local newspaper entries and carrier bags, as well as a whole host of other characters, the work seems an antiquarian’s conceit that takes time travel as a metaphoric methodology. This is not media studies; more an allegory of all reality as (tele)visual recorded history, excavating the strata of haunted technology from which the fragile band of code comprising our sense of time is briefly emitted. Drawing connections between incidents of ancient and popular culture, from Mark E. Smith’s lyric— “They say damp records the past”—to Rising Damp’s (meta)physical structure of decay, the book finds damp’s temporal power manifest in everything from alchemy, mysticism, and parish folklore to pulp, Time Team, darts, the local newspaper and, of course, the sitcom. Merging the vast with the parochial, the occult with the comedic, Code: Damp tunes into the weird demands of damp as a time-traveling material at the intersections of comedy, myth and technology, taking all three as serious resources to better (dis)orient the ground we stand on."
Here's a warm endorsement from David Tibet of Current 93 renown: "LUCIFER ON THE BUSES! Code: Damp is one of the strangest books I have read. As well as one of the most evocative, lateral, sidereal... an unspellable jewel."
More endorsements and the opportunity to purchase here
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Another addition to the racks at the local library (note the new reduced opening hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and plus Saturday 10 am to noon). Of course you may prefer to support the author by picking up a copy at Book Nook or order directly from Headpress.
Release irrationale:
William Burns's Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia examines the use and effect of nostalgia in the Horror and Hauntological realms. It asks why these genres hold such a fascination in popular culture, often inspiring devoted fanbases. From Candyman to The Blair Witch Project, and Dark Shadows to American Horror Story, are the folk horror and found footage phenomena significant artistic responses to political, social, and economic conditions, or simply an aesthetic rebranding of what has come before? How has nostalgia become linked to other concepts (psychogeography, residual haunting) to influence Hauntological music such as Boards of Canada or The Caretaker? What can the ‘urban wyrd’ or faux horror footage tell us about our idealized past? And how will these cultures of nostalgia shape the future?
Combining the author’s analysis with first-hand accounts of fans and creators, Ghost of an Idea offers a critical analysis of our cultural quest to recognize, resurrect, and lay to rest the ghosts of past and present, also summoning up those spectres that may haunt the future.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Seductive Liar, or Are We What We Used to Be?
Chapter 1: Today is Tomorrow’s Yesterday: The Philosophy of Nostalgia
Chapter 2: The Yearning to Return: Folk Horror and Nostalgia
Chapter 3: The Illusionary Precipice: Found Footage and Nostalgia
Chapter 4: The Longing of the Permanently Lost: Franchise Nostalgia
Chapter 5: An Ethereal Composition of Disjointed Memories: Nostalgia as Catalyst for the New
Chapter 6: The Vice of the Aged: Do They Still Got It or Living Off Past Glories?
Chapter 7: The Enemy of Truth: Is Nostalgia Counter-Revolutionary?
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And finally, Estonian exchange student Mart Avi has a new release out, a collaboration with his countryman Ajukaja, bearing the rather sombre title Death of Music.
It's really excellent. To me it has the feel of a classic "new pop" album - in the lineage of Lexicon of Love / Sulk / Penthouse and Pavement - but a new pop album if it had been somehow made after the 1990s. Perhaps in 2001 - the way it folds in rhythmic ideas from hardcore continuum genres and other dance styles of the 1990s - reminds me a bit of Truesteppers, in moments at least. But the songfulness and the soulfulness - along with the wayward perceptions and intellectual edge - come more from a Scott Walker or Billy Mackenzie sort of place.
It's a double album too - a meaty listen that doesn't flag on the quality front.
Release irrationale:
Certain albums hit like howling bullets at pivotal moments, tearing open the face of music to reveal hidden sonic muscles and fusing them back into something both strangely familiar and yet entirely unrecognisable. We believe this is one of those records.”
The double album Death of Music delivers 16 crooked vocal pops, some ruthless, others unexpectedly disarming. In some songs, Ajukaja & Mart Avi function like a two-headed saurus swinging its spiky tail to shady pop-house smackers. In others, Ajukaja's serene organ licks descend into subterranean caverns, allowing Avi to float to the surface on their wavelengths and turn his voice into billions of extinct moths, enslaved by the moonlight’s pull. There are songs that face destruction and those that seek to prevent it.
One kykeon rap goes, “If you die before you die, then when you die, you don't die!”. Ajukaja & Mart Avi have embraced this notion to create new music that allows them to thrive in the algorithmic wasteland. 13 years in the making, these 66 minutes are packed with lifetimes of truths you didn’t know you needed to know. They are Ajukaja & Mart Avi – two against death.
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."
Christmas is coming and that can only mean one thing - new stocking stuffers from Moon Wiring Club!
These comprise excellent new album Sepia Cat City, a new issue of Catmask, a calendar, a T-shirt, an array of badges, and a selection of seasonal greeting cards.
Sepia Cat City is the final instalment of MWC's Cat Location trilogy (see The Most Unusual Cat in the Village + The Only Cat Left in Town). It's one of Ian Hodgson's excursions into the entropic, possibly my favorite of his modes (although I do love the classic reverb-bassline, dankly dancey mode too). If anything, this is more delirious-sounding than some of his boggy seepage of recent years. Minded me of nothing else at all really, except just maybe some of the more disintegrated moments on 23 Skidoo's Seven Songs. Particularly enjoyed the skidding scumbles of the aptly named "Scatterbrain 9" and the whiplash churns of "Boarded Up House Musicke".
Ian Hodgson holds forth about inspirations and orientations:
"For quite a few years I’d vaguely wanted to do something with Punk aesthetics.... A lot of the Punk visuals I recalled were (despite the fluorescent hair) monochromatic, undoubtably this was absorbed via exposure to the photocopied zine scene. So from an early age Punk seemed a bit ancient and gelled in my mind with similarly monochromatic Victorian sepia daguerreotypes... As long as I can remember I’ve had Sepia Punk as an unfocused aesthetic floating around my noggin. In my favourite series of Sapphire & Steel (Assignment 4), the opening episode, which is set circa 1980, has a group of children playing in the back yard of a shared house ~ they’ve all been taken out of a Victorian photograph and have sepia toned skin & clothes. There’s something about the studio setting + ‘off’ videotape telly colour of it all that makes it really appealing. From this I’ve always liked the specific idea of a Sepia Ghost Gang...
"Over the past couple of years, I’ve also been watching quite a lot of grimy New York films. There’s something about the 'decaying city as movie backdrop' that I find really appealing, and it really fits with the current state of the UK ~ collapsing deregulated infrastructure. I’d say the less-obvious ones that stuck in my mind were Smithereens, Cruising, Wolfen (bit daft + so good) and Desperately Seeking Susan.... In pretty much every film there’s some kind of gang activity going on, and most of them are wearing leather jackets. I also really like the mixture of musical styles... often a default excellent funky post-Shaft score would be underpinning everything.
"This fed into my long-term Punk rumination ~ how can you make a Punk album if you don’t really like punk rock music? If you set out to make an ‘authentic’ Punk record it would be totally boring even if you succeeded... The solution I came to was that you could make a Punk album inspired by what may have influenced the musicians of the time, rather than the specific music that was actually made.
"I also read Cathi Unsworth’s excellent Season of the Witch Goth book... one snippet that really stuck in my mind was that Magazine wanted John Barry to produce their second album.... It really got me thinking ~ 'what if you took a load of the more arty Punk inspirations (John Barry, Avengers, Vivienne Westwood, 2000AD comic, Herzog, even something contemporaneous like Cindy Sherman) and made something with an attempt to emulate that mindset?'.
"... I started gluing everything together with Sepia Punk in mind. I’m strongly in favour of recycling audio, so along with a large variety of newly conjured bits n bobs, I went through the MWC archive ov tat and pulled out stuff that I thought might fit with the style. What I found was that certain fragments that had already been used on specific MWC releases could be nicely repurposed ~ especially once combined / glued together / looped into oblivion with a freshly composed segment. So it was as if the defining characteristics (or the potential) of the overriding Sepia Punk idea had latently existed within the original material...
"The Cat Location LP format - 4x10min tracks - suited this composition mix, and from a narrative perspective the idea that you move from a cozy but unsettling village, to a deserted echoing town to eventually ending up joining a stylish ghost gang in a corroded city was exactly right.
"The artwork allowed the fashionable Punk / alternative characters to manifest naturally, but one thing I always wanted was not to have a uniform style of city architecture ~ most cities are a mishmash of styles so it was important to include that crumbling Victorian warehouse vibe rather than just ‘can’t-we-have-something-else-please default Hauntology setting’ 70s concrete.
"The first track "Ghosts of the Underground Market" - I’ve always been fascinated by Underground Markets, specifically this one which used to have a few alternative / weird shops before the '92 IRA bomb allowed mass homogenisation / insidious gentrification to creep in. If you walk over the concreted street site now, I reckon on a rainy Sunday morning you can still hear the dusty ghosts of the market shops, sedimented inside rusty escalators and echoing with the patchouli oil-scented sounds of grotty ’78 records + bootleg post-punk cassette tapes."
"The third track 'Boarded Up House Musike' is a combination of two interests ~ in those 70s NYC films there would often be a grot disco scene and I wanted a representation of a dodgy svengali / hippy cult leader style figure that always features in squat / commune dwelling telly."
"After I’d sent the LP off for manufacture, I deliberately didn’t listen to it for about 4 months... The main thing that it reminded me of was 20 Jazz Funk Greats ~ which sort of makes sense going by the inspirations. I’m happy with that because it would have been completely impossible for me to make a record that sounded (a bit) like Throbbing Gristle intentionally."
Ah, so I wasn't a million miles off course with my 23 Skidoo thought.
As for Catmask No. 2 - this ultra-vividly designed publication lurks somewhere undecidable between a pop annual, a hard-spined comic book in the Tintin tradition, and Radio Times (albeit with dramatically upscaled paper stock and color reproduction).
Must say I do really like the new 'punkified' twist on the Moon Wiring Girl, as seen on the postcard below.
With the vinyl LP, there is a fold out poster that features a bunch of alterna-girls and sepia punkettes - it reminded me just a teensy bit of the Gee Vaucher fold-out for Crass ("Bloody Revolutions" I think) with Margaret Thatcher all anarchopunxified.
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Apart from that... it's pretty quiet in the parish.
But hey let loose your credit card, as there's a notable reissue - The Focus Group's classic mini-LP Hey Let Loose Your Love, originally released in 2005, is out again on 10-inch vinyl, compact disc, and the various digital formats and avenues.
Part of that originating starburst of hauntology landmarks - alongside Dead Air, The Willows, An Audience of Art Deco Eyes, Other Channels, The Death of Rave- Hey Let Loose is one of my Top 5 albums of the 2000s. Something I've never stopped playing, in fact.
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But yes here in the parish, there's a hibernating feeling
In a neighbouring village, though, stirrings of note - a Bristol-aligned, if not always Bristol-located sound that is sparse but sensual... bewitching twists on time-and-place rooted traits.... soulful, sombre, spacey, desolated, dubbily reduced and not-all-there.
Via the label Do You Have Peace?, an album by Jabu, Boiling Wells, and a compilation, Always + Forever.
‘Always + Forever’ is the first compilation to be released on Do You Have Peace?, the Bristol-based label run by Jabu. Collecting thirteen unreleased tracks from artists both new and familiar to the label, the album weaves an unorthodox collaborative web.... Originally conceived as a project to link together the dream-pop oriented leanings of a disparate group of artists, as the project grew it became more amorphous and developed its own narrative, held by a strange, half-awake quality throughout. The pop leanings are still there, although often buried under clouds of reverb, and they take their place among less heavy-lidded bedroom confessionals, DIY chamber pieces, and teary-eyed instrumental passages. The majority of the vocal-led tracks occur on the first half of the album, leaving the second section to drift into more sedative, hypnagogic terrain. Where further voices do reappear, they feel more like half-remembered fragments of dream-speech. As the words eventually leave us completely, the album closes out through three chamber pieces, transposing classical instrumentation from the lofty heights of concert halls to more intimate and familiar settings: a box room in a flat, a bedroom, a memory of lying awake staring at the ceiling and trying to go to sleep again.
An essential addition to Do You Have Peace?'s catalogue, the record serves as another example of the label’s continual reframing / recontextualising of their music and influences. Like Jabu’s gradual shift from their post-dubstep / hip-hop roots to a more ethereal dream-pop sound, or the continual shift and sprawl of their NTS show with Andy Payback (one of the very best shows on the platform), it foregrounds an impeccable taste and a masterful grasp of context and connectivity. Wonderfully zoned-out and immersive, it’s a meticulously programmed, fully cohesive compilation that leads the listener on a journey ever deeper into the night.
Featuring Equiknoxx's Time Cow, HTRK's Jonnine, and Jabu's Guest (appearing both solo and in collaborative mode with Birthmark), there are solo outings from Tarquin Manek (aka Silzedrek / Static Cleaner Lost Reward) and his sometime collaborator YL Hooi. Young Echo's Vessel contributes both solo and in tandem with Rakhi Singh (Manchester Collective), Zaumne appears with relative newcomer Hermeneia. Teresa Winter's 'Juniper' offers a sweet bridge to the tracks it's bookended by, and a counterpoint to the two consecutive offerings from the mysterious Laughter of Saints.
'Always & Forever' is set for release on December 8th on digital formats and a limited vinyl edition of 300 copies. Featuring cover artwork from Skkinz, the record is pressed on black vinyl with full download coupon.
Demos/sketches/interludes from the hinterland between records. Drum machines and single take vocal sketches tied together with downtime synth experiments and recordings of local disappearing areas.’
True as it is, Jabu’s strapline is a somewhat understated take on what also proved to be a transformative experience for them. The follow-up record to their 2020 sophomore LP ‘Sweet Company’ (and the ensuing ‘Versions’), ‘Boiling Wells’ sees tracks stitched together in one long, seamless flow and weaves a smudged, group-mind spell. Originally released earlier this year without fanfare as a ltd. cassette and digital release, it now receives the proper release attention it deserves, issued in a neatly packaged vinyl edition of 300 copies. Dreamlike, woozy, raw and in dub, the album documents a blossoming process, and encapsulates a fragment in time - holed up in the country, soaking up the atmosphere in collective isolation, creatively embracing the limitations of a small recording set-up, and finding a new way to work as a band...
Jabu’s debut album proper, ‘Sleep Heavy’, arrived in 2017 courtesy of Blackest Ever Black. A sublime, focused meditation on grief and loss written largely by Amos and Al, it marked the debut of Jasmine Butt (aka Guest), adding a further layer of vocal texture to their palette. ‘Sweet Company’, their first album written as a trio (released via their own Do You Have Peace? label), drifted into lighter, more ethereal introspection....
. A celebration of the endless tapestry of interrelated musical connections, it runs parallel to Jabu’s own reinterpretation of their influences. For ‘Boiling Wells’, Amos remembers a diet of “A.R. Kane, Cocteau Twins, DJ Screw, Southern/Memphis rap mixtapes, early 90’s jungle, Karen Dalton, Sybille Baier, Vashti Bunyan, Svitlana Nianio, a lot of soul, Armand Hammer & Alchemist, Grouper, Bobby Caldwell. Jazz was a constant, Japanese, Polish, Latin, American…”. And from those diverse strands, something new and singular has formed, to line up alongside them.
Some slightly earlier stuff - like a lover's rock Maria Minerva
Affiliated once, or maybe still, with the Young Echo cru
Neatly, sweetly, described by a Bandcamp commentator:
It's like if Tricky ran a orphanage and had all of the foster kids from many different backgrounds learn how to make trip hop tunes...but with their own experiences with Punk, reggae, Hip hop, etc...i love this collective.
Well, of course, now I think about it, Tricky was one of the first artists to get the word "hauntology" affixed to him, right...
Did really like this first Young Echo album
Inna GRM stylee
(didyaseewhatIdunthere)
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Stirrings even further afield - in our twin town in Germany, Gespensterland
"The sound they make blends the contemporary and the traditional, stitching-together archaic instrumentation and modern electronic production techniques, all wrapped up in the influence of folk songs and nursery rhymes, fantasy, and myth. Its makers—who release their surreal and dreamlike music under names like Brannten Schnüre, Kirschstein, and Freundliche Kreisel—sing in their native German about strange and eerie things: hauntings and silences and absences. This sense of mystery is further cultivated by the fact that the people who make this music prefer not to speak publicly about it, refusing conventional press interviews. Perhaps they fear that added context will weaken the unusual energies that move through their music. Ghosts, after all, can’t thrive under the cold light of scrutiny....
"This is meticulous, occasionally mischievous music, dotted with distinctly German cultural reference points. Schoppik’s self-titled debut solo album under the name Läuten der Seele, released in 2002, took samples of Heimatfilme—a post-war genre of German cinema consisting of sentimental morality tales—and gently twisted them into something distinctly unheimlich. There are scattered references to the supernatural and occult. Writing of the experimental sound manipulations he performs as Baldruin, Schebler invokes the psychokinetic activity of the poltergeist, a German term that translates as “noisy spirit.”
Teutonic rendering of "Scarborough Fair" there - cross-contamination of volkisch traditions.
Mr. Pattison notes that the Gespensterland compilation cover is a "blurry image" that appears to capture "a scene from some pagan festival: a flower-wreathed Green Man transplanted onto the streets of suburban West Germany."
Gespensterland, if you are wondering, translates as Ghostland.
All this reminded me of the German on the roster of Ghost Box - ToiToiToi, whose Vaganten I particularly enjoyed, making me think of "Der Plan if they'd formed in 16th Century Swabia"
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Finally some ancient maunderings 'n' mitherings on the subject of H-ology, between myself and Richard Lockley-Hobson. During the course of which I observe that:
I think every country or nationality... has its own Hauntology. Potentially anyway. This sort of cultural or para-cultural substrate of common experience that you don’t really notice until it’s gone.
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update 12/15
From our twin town in France - a late addition, via a tip off from Dave Howell:
PRENDS LE TEMPS D'ECOUTER - Musique d'expression libre dans les classes Freinet / Tape Music, Sound Experiments and free folk songs from Freinet Classes - 1962/1982
Before listening I wondered if this was real or whether it was one of those fictitious 'avant music made by schoolkids' releases like D.D. Denham's Electronic Music In the Classroom
After listening... well, I'm still not sure
An earlier release by the same label, Lancepierre, also seems like a prime slice of French hauntology, or at least the kind of thing that would inspire a French hauntology: a reissue titled Outremusique pour enfants 1974-1985
Just look at the set-up for the rerelease-rationale:
"In the land of Presidents Giscard and Mitterand, thermal clothing and elbow pads, Sautet films and Sunday roasts, the carpeting of a nursery is strewn with a handful of 7-inches. There, exotic birds and courteous elephants guarding a castle built with cakes form a Front for the Liberation of the Imaginary: colourful, systematically framed illustrations standing out against the cream background of gatefold sleeves… doorways to a maze of sounds at the crossroads between the neatest form of chanson and the most prospective jazz.
"Founded in the course of the 1970s by Philippe Gavardin, the small collection named Chevance is above all the story of buddies who were out and about between the twilight of the Trente Glorieuses and the disenchantment that followed the socialists’ rise to power, gravitating around this mentor known for his kindness and curiosity. Originally a linguist, Gavardin was one of these open-minded intellectuals, with one foot in the Contrescarpe cabarets and the other in step with the avant-garde, combining his apparently classical tastes with a keen interest in the novelties of his time. It is notably with Jean-Louis Méchali—a drummer from the free jazz scene who became Gavardin’s team-mate and arranged a good deal of the releases—that he forged the identity of this series of recordings for the younger generations: musically janus-faced, definitely literary, impregnated with a surrealism that echoed the decade’s psychedelic and libertarian experiments. The label developed a real editorial policy disregarding commercial constraints. Each record took a clear direction: modern fables, bestiaries, musical tales, cookbooks… Words were the backbone and every release was both carefully designed and perfectly manufacture..."
