3. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World - The Caretaker [2011]

Meditations on memory and decay. Retrospection, amnesia, repetition, regression. Alzheimer’s unmasked. The last stand of the prefrontal cortex. Atrophy. 

Stripping away phonographic fidelity by gradations, James Leyland Kirby mirrors the peeling back of memory, re-construing time-locked thought in a haunted present. 

Kirby's genius is to make decay tangible. He is a craftsman who makes audible the ticking of memory's clock as it winds down to a vanishing point.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Patience (After Sebald) - The Caretaker [2012]

Leyland Kirby's custodial nom de plume references Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining, inspiration also for his early musical stock in trade: sampled, manipulated 78s a-crackle with sweet-desolate-stranded 1920s/1930s dance tunes. Archival meditations on appropriation, memory, and the accretion and disappearance of cultural objects, Kirby's tracks dangle, turn slowly like rods on a disintegrating mobile.

Soundtrack to a film about writer W.G. Sebald, in place of spectral jazz-age ballroom, Patience draws from Franz Schubert, crafting melody saturated and motif uncanny. Kirby's thaumaturgy mixes emotional states - memory, decay, loss, childhood and life ahead filled with possibility - like no other.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Children of the Drones - Various

Spooky, warped, & wigged-out. Apparently took Fearlono (Cottage of electric Hell!) ages  and whole lot of Mr Miyagi to mix. Mega-lithic.

Oddi wrth y brawd
king of the castle

The Masque of Bruma - Golau Glau [2011]

Uncanny Christmas the second.


Haunted carols, radiophonic mummers play and Ghost Box remix gift from Ye Advisory Circle.


01 The Yule Cat
There is an Icelandic myth. A giant cat comes on Christmas Eve to eat anyone who did not receive new clothing as a gift. You must finish all work with the wool before Yule...


02 The Owd Tup
Golau Glau's radiophonic take on the mummers play 'The Owd Tup', which was mostly performed in the Sheffield area and is based around the traditional folk song 'The Derby Ram'.


03 Wassail Branch
The wassail branch is decorated with holly, ivy and tiny silver bells. The city creeps into the season...


04 God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Golau Glau's folky, electronic take on this traditional carol.


05 Oak Moon (Advisory Circle Radio Edit)
Remix of 'Oak Moon' from 'Myrrh & Myth' by The Advisory Circle (Ghost Box).


06 Coventry Carol
Golau Glau's Italo-ish take on this 16th century, very beautiful mummers carol about the Murder of the Innocents. 








Oddi wrth y brawd
full download

The Owl's Map - Belbury Poly

Familiar Ghost Box trooping of the tropes: Garner's The Owl Service; Machen machinations; the Great God Pan; Toopian sinister resonance of the uncanny; 70s local television rurally themed programmes.


 A rarefied furrow, rewardingly ploughed. Get with it.

Oddi wrth y brawd
chalchiuhtecolotl

The Willows - Belbury Poly [2004]

Time and again in Arthur Machen's so-called "weird" fiction urban, urbane and above all mundane modernity is only a whisper away from ineffable pre-Christian energies; latent elemental forces poised to seep through the fabric of scientific scepticism.  Representationally then not unlike the cover's Green Man superimposed on molecular model. The Green Man is essentially a syncretic deity: paganism's horned god, Cernunnos, or as Machen has it: The Great God Pan. Typical Machen protagonists dally on the cusp between science and mythos - anthropologist, ethnologist and archaeologist - or listlessly wander drab urban environments and liminal subarban streets, disconnected, apathetic but feeling still the mythopoeic pull. Inspired, Belbury Poly's Jim Jupp responds to greyly prosaic 70s Britain not with some acoustic wicca-shit wyrdout but instead summoning a techno-arcadian idyll, mixing sunny uplands and shadowy hollows. Shades encroach most balefully on third track Caermaen: both placename and setting for some very rum doings in Machen's The Hill of Dreams. 


Ofttimes, Machen's characters are haunted by memory and uncanny imagination; a magical, unsettling deja vu. Belbury Poly's  soundworld conjures matching sensibilities, somewhat analagous to those curious tonal juxtapositions common on 70s kids TV where perky radiophonic theme tune rubs up against spectral public information film warning children to stay away from lonely stretches of water. Check the pairing of tracks A Thin Place and Farmer's Angle. The first all eldritch arpeggios and foggy mellotron flute, the second warm glow psilocybin Jack Hargreaves puttering down a country lane.


Plenty to mine below the surface. Dig deep and mind how you go.

Oddi wrth y brawd
ornaments in formica

An Empty Bliss Beyond This World - The Caretaker [2011]

James Leyland Kirby strips away by gradations at phonographic fidelity, mirroring the peeling back of memories re-construing time-locked and haunting loops. Alzheimer's patients enduring memory attrition can still recall songs from their distant past. The prefrontal cortex is among the last brain regions to atrophy. 


Occasionally memory and melody are lucid: Moments of Sufficient Lucidity; Camaraderie at Arm's Length; Libet's Delay. Kirby's genius is to make tangible decay and elusive manifest: Bedded Deep in Long Term Memory; I Feel as if I might be Vanishing; The Sublime is Disappointingly Elusive -  and to make audible the ticking of history's metaphysical clock.


Sublime, timeless and beautiful. Like a life well lived.

Oddi wrth y brawd
tiny gradations of loss

Work And Non Work - Broadcast [1997]

If, like y brawd, you feel the idea of Stereolab is always better than the execution, then prepare to have your world changed for the better. This early singles mini-LP compilation - intimations of more sophisticated retro-future stylings to come - is an absolute delight. Electro-filmic vignettes pushing all the right buttons. With the grandeur of masterpiece The Noise Made By People just around the corner, here are Broadcast stretching out well ahead of the hauntological curve, digging through yesteryear visions of future nostalgia and coming up top trumps.


Check earlier WB post Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age for best psych album 2009.


Also, proper job Karl Taul for amateur vid for the Book Lovers:

Trish Keenan RIP


Oddi wrth y brawd
l'amoureux des livres

The Strange New World of Bernard Fevre - Black Devil Disco Club [2009]

Copping new mixes of material from Fevre's 1975 album of library music salvage The Strange World of Bernard Fevre. Attractively old-fangled in a future now stylee. Musty analog synth abounds. Tracks restored, replayed and reinvigorated. Students of Belbury Poly take note: master at work.

Oddi wrth y brawd
cosmic rays

The Conet Project Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations [1997]

Weird, wired, paranoid shit and a whole new world of possibilities across ghostly unilluminated static.

Shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin believed to be operated by government agencies to communicate with field agents. This collection based on the work of numbers station enthusiast Akin Fernandez, released on Irdial-Discs label.

Unsettling and unaccountably compelling.



Oddi wrth y brawd
1
2

Thanks to Pagan Dad ...
More buzz UVB-76

An Audience of Art Deco Eyes - Moon Wiring Club [2007]

Familiar jauntily creepy shenanigans and future past re-imaginings. Most sounds sourced from television, film and dialogue snafflings from public service broadcasts submerged amongst odd percussion and bleeping Radiophonic burblings. What is it about the repetition of de-contextualised phrases such as "key too small" and "the picture in the house" that summon up all kinds of Armchair Thriller uneasiness? Go figure. Track titles tell a similar story: An invitation to shoebox garden; Some cobwebbed limbo; Dumpley's acrostics. It's not all atmospherics though and there are quirky melodic delights aplenty herein.

Open up your inner ghost box.

Oddi wrth y brawd
ghost radio

Other Channels - The Advisory Circle [Ghost Box 10]

And so to New Media fuelled nostalgia cult as creative act. Old Media - broadcast - time is simultaneous, punctual; New Media time is distributed, fragmented. Eliot's Waste Land modus operandi plays out nightly on cheapo Top 100 Funniest Sit-Com Moments: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" - quite.

In an idiolectically narrowed world of highly personalised memetic re-composition, the OedIpod - to use K-Punk's phrase - has displaced pop as spectacle. Two examples from Momus: Bowie's appearance on Extras and the end of Top of the Pops - reinforce the impression that celebreality has subsumed pop. In each case, we see the triumph of the celebreality principle over fantasy and glamour. From playing the alien on TOTP  - and marginalising a nation in the process - to playing a banal yet unbelievable version of himself in the matey star cameo second series Extras, Bowie's trajectory is emblematic. Stick around long enough and haunting is the inescapable, cheapening effect of modernity.

Less risible and inarguably much more fun are the Ghost Box crew excursions into worlds of BBC Radiophonic Workshop, library music, test transmissions and public information broadcasts. Amongst the scattered electro-static and glitchy debris are some melodic reminders that cutting edge sounds of the 70s were as much the preserve of the parochial and pedestrian as the experimentalists. Indeed, parts of this release sound like a great lost Cluster album somewhere between Zuckerzeit and Sowiesoso.

The Ghost Box moniker is well-chosen of course. Earliest cited application of hauntology as music label or genre goes to Ian Penman in mid-90s edition of The Wire. The provenance of the term generally is still more venerable: a neologism coined by Marxist philosopher Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx. Derrida invokes not just the ghost of Marx's manifesto  - "a spectre [is] haunting Europe" - but also the shade of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

“Time is out of joint”  cues the tenuous connection between past, present and future. The past always haunts the present, obviously, but equally so does the future. In a Ballardian sense this "nostalgia for the future" introduces a ghost – in this case, Hamlet’s father – and so creates a tear and a fold in history. Derrida takes the point further with “To be or not to be”: introducing haunting into all conceptual constructs, beginning with the concepts of being and time. The nature of being or ontology is nothing less than hauntology-in-action. Ontology is fundamentally spectral.

In the original French the felicitous homophony works a treat: hauntology-ontology (try with French accent). Something of a sense of humour then these Marxist philosophers.

Humour too plays a role in Ghost Box plunderings. Though it's frequently humour on the edge of hysteria, panic and neurosis. Their treatment of the public information film Frozen Ponds is utterly chilling and made scarier than original creators could have ever imagined.

Make of all this what you will; Derrida is de writer...

Oddi wrth y brawd
civil defence is common sense

Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age

In some quarters considered the best album of 2009, BATFG bring a bang up to date take on classic Piper at the Gates era psych. They retrofit contemporary electronics to revitalise the aural hallucinatory shenanigans explored by the class of ‘67/68. Winningly, organs, electric pianos and all manner of period keyboard flourishes are exempt from the make over treatment. With so many ideas and most of the 23 tracks coming in at around 2 minutes, there’s no time to get bored, though you might start hankering for a proper Interstellar Overdrive proportioned workout. Best approached as psychedelic ambient.

Oddi wrth y brawd
investigate

Persistent Repetition of Phrases - The Caretaker

Meditations on memory and decay. Retrospection, amnesia, repetition, regression; Alzheimer’s unmasked. Overtaken by false memory syndrome in the ballroom at the Overlook Hotel. The sadness of lives lived and unremembered. History has ended. We lean towards ideas and aesthetics that are rustic, bizarre and old-timey. That is, towards the ghost of the past.

Oddi wrth y brawd
Gwiriwch

More hauntology
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