Other Channels
Through Delia Derbyshire and Dick Mills's work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the '60s, JG Ballard's suburban sci-fi, Throbbing Gristle's camp industrial dream, Trunk Records, Broadcast's haunting pop and now Ghost Box's roster of artists runs something strange and quintessentially English. Part creepy, part childish, part occult in the sense of time-treasured knowledge, it's a funny-peculiar, mannered sense of things that eludes definition but is instantly felt. It's there in classic UK children's TV, too - think Chocky, The Tripods, Worzel Gummidge - that true psych-out atmosphere, born of shadows, spook-domestic and extremely potent.
Jon Brooks, aka The Advisory Circle, may do this better than anyone yet. His debut album - aptly titled Other Channels - is a masterpiece of what Heads have started calling 'Hauntology'; a lush, reanimated kind of music steeped in the history of recording and acidly evocative. Concrete sounds from Public Information radio and an endless palette of Foley-type movie sound effects are interwoven with Brooks's candy-strength melodies and arrangements for synth, wind and string instruments so seamlessly as to render recorded time ended, or forever, and uncanny. It's preternaturally good and tranquilising in both senses; like watching Dr Who after school and after drugs.
Release: Album
To Cure: A predictable playlist
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