The Advisory Circle - From Out Here

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GhostBox seem to be releasing less and less. I think the last one I bought was early 2013's Elektrik Karousel by The Focus Group (We'll just forget about The Sound Carriers shall we). The Advisory Circle's From Out Here came out yesterday and well the sound of brown continues. The Mrs says "Someone playing with their Casio in 1983." She lived in a small seaside village in North Wales at the time. She adds while Escape Lane is playing "Lovely use of minor falls." During Causeway Ballet she offers "This is very soothing and gentle and somehow familiar." This LP isn't anywhere near as jaunty as their previous LP As The Crow Flies from 2011. We're heading into much stranger zones on From Out Here. For every melodic and idyllic tune there's a peculiar one. It wouldn't be an Advisory Circle album without a couple of logo tones would it? There are two here. Gee whizz, he's even in 'Ekoplekz for babies' territory on Experiment. While the usual hauntological themes are present and accounted for such as 70s TV, library music, eeriness, information films, found dialogue and Radiophonica, this album captures the stillness, innocuousness, melancholia and the metaphysics of being. I dunno if it's just me today (impending birthday) or what?...but this album has signalled to me like no other that we are trapped (even though it's fleeting) in time. Lost in a time-warp and vaguely bewildered. Zoloft world....

Speaking of great batting averages John Brooks, the man behind the moniker The Advisory Circle is almost up there with Moon Wiring Club's Ian Hodgson, his collaborator on the Woodbines & Spiders record from earlier this year. Whether Jon is in solo mode (The excellent Music For Thomas Carnacki, Music For Dieter Rams and Shapwick) under the pseudonyms D.D. Denham (The terrific Electronic Music In The Classroom), Georges Vert (An Electric Mind) or making Advisory Circle albums his strike rate is high. The intriguing debut Advisory Circle mini-album Mind How You Go came out in 2005 and the masterpiece Other Channels was released in 2008. Wow, Mind How You Go is nearly 10 years old. It seems so much older and yet it also seems more recent at the same time. Is this atemporal stasis? It's some kind of paradox befitting the music of The Advisory Circle anyway.

*These soundbite things on soundcloud are rather annoying aren't they? That's the first & last time I'll embed them in a post!

2013 Best LPs

eMMplekz - Your Crate Has Changed
Semi lucid ranting over hallucinatory electronic dub splatter.

The Focus Group - The Elektrik Karousel
A spooky and disorientating trip out to melt your mind.  Psychedelia for now and never.

Ensemble Skalectrik - Trainwrekz
Transmissions from.....somewhere or nowhere.

Gesaffelstein - Aleph
Beautiful paranoid urban atmospheres, bangin streamlined EBM and cold rushes.

Primitive Calculators - The World Is Fucked
More confrontational than ever. Age has not mellowed Australia's greatest post-punk band!

Tim Hecker - Virgins
The ghosts of 20th century's monumentalism.

Umberto - Confrontations
The soundtrack to match the alien invasion movie in your mind.

Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
It was hard to resist those tunes on the back half of this album in the end. Get your singin & dancin shoes on.

House In The Woods - Bucolica
Rural isolationist journeys into sound.

Lieven Martens Moana - Music From The Guardhouse
Dolphins Into The Future's main man delivers another warped environmental electronic masterpiece. He's on an oceanic roll.

The others I also liked

Skull & Shark - Lazerhawk
Ooga Boogas - Ooga Boogas
New Dark Age Of Love - Xander Harris
Fire Funmania - The Horrorist
Cold Mission - Logos
Cortex Meridian - Panabrite
Devesham Dub - Ekoplekz
Earl Grey Whistle Test - Robin The Fog
Secret Songs Of Savamala - Howlround
The Harbinger Of Spring - Children Of Alice
She Beats - Beaches
Testpressings 1-3 - Demdike Stare
Watching Dead Empires In Decay - The Stranger

The others that I didn't

James Ferraro - Cold,
James Ferraro - NYC Hell 3am
Stellar Om Source - Joy One Mile
Grouper - The Man Who Died In His Boat

On The Fence

Tomorrows Harvest - Boards Of Canada
I dunno if this is great, just ok or a complete waste of time (and I love their other records).
A Fondness For Hats - Moon Wiring Club
Only got it today, I'll get back to you on that.
Night Slugs All Stars Vol. 2 - Various
It's good and all that but it sounds more like the recent past than the future (as many claim it to be). Then again it's good though....or is it?....
Living In The Past - Manix
Well the title says it all but when those mentasm stabs kick in towards the end it's a little bit awesome.
Empty Avenues - John Foxx & The Belbury Circle
A charming new pop direction for GhostBox or 'sounds a bit like Nik Kershaw singin over a crappy library record?'

Stay Away From My Eardrums Pleaz

Lorde
Lilly Allen
Arcade Fire
And most of what's on my Channel V ie. 10,000 of Mumford's sons.

Stuff On The Interweb

There's been heaps of good stuff over at blog to the oldskool including this mini mix from junglistz Foul Play and this 20 minute documentary on Gabber. This is quite bizarre and a little bit scary. It's a portal into a very specific time and place. Check out some of the most mental dancing from the 90s! It's funny now how tame and normal a lot of gabba now sounds. I'm in the 90s now.

Here's an excellent interview with Julian House the dude from the GhostBox label and man behind The Focus Group over at The Quietus. Here's an old bit on Julian from 2006 at K-Punk. Over at bandcamp there is a 19 minute track from The Children Of Alice, a trio made up of House and 2 members of Broadcast, called The Harbinger Of Spring which is well worth your 3 quid!

I only just discovered this Moon Wiring Club Mix Midnight In Europe over at NightVision here which is a bit different than MWCs usual mixes. This mix is of 90s ambient post rave electronica and includes Woob, Baby Ford, LFO, Biosphere, Luke Slater and many more. I'm in the 90s now in a chill-out room. Do they still have those?

On The Hi-Fi Part 27

Crucify Your Love - Dylan Ettinger
Now this guy has moved on quite a bit. He made one of the landmark statements of Hynagogia, New Age Outlaws from 2010. Some even consider that record to be where H-Pop ended. So where do you go from there? Particularly if people are saying that's the end of the genre but you created one of its masterpieces. Perhaps that call was a little early but all the same, what do you do next? Should you stick with it till the revival comes around? How long would that leave you in the wilderness though? Stasis V progression. This new ep is somewhere in between. It's like the Cabs have hijacked the hynagogia party. There are vocals in in a deep dubbed fug/fog amongst the H-pop sounds. Is that progression or regression? It puts this work in a zone not that far from eMMplekz but more on an easier listening tip, if that makes any sense at all. It's pretty good/Odd!?

OFF/On - Forma (2012)
Finally getting around to hearing this release from very late last year due to SLX having it as their record of the year for 2012. I didn't hate that first LP but it just didn't surpass its influences Cluster, Harmonia et al. This is top notch electronics retaining some of that Kraut vibe but now including 80s drum soundz, soundtracky motifs and even delving into 90s electronica. Who knows in a couple of albums time they may be soundtracking the new future and not the retro-future.

The Garnet Toucan - Monopoly Child Searchers (2012)
Another release from late last year. This time it's the other Skater you know the one who is not James Ferraro. Talk bout becoming the Andrew Ridgley or the other guy from Style Council of Skaters. I have over 30 releases by Mr Ferraro and not one solo outing from Spencer Clark until this landed on my lap. There was the excellent Inner Tube release last year which was a collaboration with Mark McGuire of Emeralds. You could slap a Ferraro label on this and I would be none the wiser. It really could be an old tape from 2009. That's a good thing here. Plastic fourth into fifth world neon soundz makes this a quality LP that I can't stop playing.

Random Access Memories - Daft Punk
Do I really need to add to the discourse of this cd? For what it's worth I fell asleep the first 2 times I listened to this. On the 3rd listen I started to enjoy the tracks towards the end of RAM. I really think this is a bad case of track placement error.

The Elektrik Karousel - The Focus Group
The title says it all really. This is like an acid trip through an horrific fairground (aren't they all a little bit spooky?). The emphasis being on the trip. You get into the zone with this LP and you are on a sonic ghost ride. Dear Wire reviewer I don't need to be English to enjoy this and I don't need to be humming its tunes once the Voyage is over. If I wanted to hum some tunes all day long I'd listen to Abba. This is about listening in the moment and that's what The Focus Group are all about. Another GhostBox gem!

The Focus Group New LP

Looking forward to this being released tomorrow. 2013 has got to have at least one good record!

Ghost Box

I noted somewhere Ghostbox was getting a bagging possibly because it's old news or is it because that guy from LCD System is now rocking an old skool Librarian/Geography teacher look. I only just let Jarvis get away with it or did I? It was a bit weird after many years of beard wearing and being sometimes bespectacled that people started saying 'oh you look a bit like Jarvis.'  Maybe that LCD guy is gonna do a Hauntological album, then you'll know it's time to move on. If those GhostBox Study Series of singles, Belbury Poly's The Belbury Tales and that new Pye Corner Audio record are anything to go by GhostBox are in fine shape! I can't wait for a new Focus Group record.

*Also in other things related there is this new mix over at Pontone by IX Tab who I only found out about today. Choice cuts in this mix. Pontone have done it again by getting these guys to do a mix. Best Pontone Mix in ages.

**Also while in the ball park I found an old  Moon Wiring Club mix I'd somehow missed along the way. I've talked about all the other 4 or 5, so this was a nice surprise. It's called Bleep 43 or something? Click on the link. There's loads of film, radio and telly dialogue amongst the op shop records, library music and like minded artist's trax.

This is another fantastic Moon Wiring Club track. I've not seen that record anywhere in Melbourne and It's not on i-tunes. Was it only a limited thing? Maybe I'm gonna have to start ordering things via the Internet. Have I reached that phase in human evolution? Perhaps. On a similar note I haven't seen a GhostBox record in Melbourne since Synathsesia shut up shop years ago.

Energy Flash/Hauntology

Here is a quote from page 164 of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave & Dance Culture written by Simon Reynolds and originally published in 1998 but this is a 2012 edition.

'Imagine the theme music for a 50s Government film about Britain's new garden cities: serene, symmetrical, euphonious, evoking the socially engineered for a post war New Order.'

Here Mr Reynolds was referring to some of the music that Aphex Twin was making early in his career. I wonder if Boards Of Canada were reading this but didn't they already exist? or if the GhostBox crew were taking notes because it sounds like Simon Reynolds invented Hauntology 6 or 7 years ahead of its time, well the theory and subtext to it anyway. When I first heard BOC I thought shite they remind me a little of Seefeel & Aphex Twin, which to me was in no way a bad thing! I wonder if Simon is aware of this portentous quoted passage or realises his complicity in the entire idea/genre? I know he is a big fan of the whole thing and has scribbled many words on the topic via his blog and in an article for The Wire magazine many moons ago.