April 2013, Broadcast on the cover of "Shindig"!

I cradle a hope in my heart that Broadcast will one day go down as Legends.

Its funny, because they gave me such hope in modern music that I actually seek out new bands now, something i had never done before (tho i have always been a deep digger of older obscurities). What's so funny about that is that the more new bands that i hear the better Broadcast becomes. I get a better understanding of the context and content of modern (and by modern i mean, 90's and up) music and i understand that my 20+ years of bitching about how modern music sucks was not terribly off the mark, actually. It just makes Broadcast a billion times more special.

They are satisfying on so many levels. If you want spooky pastoral, they can take you there. If you want to move your ass, they can take you there as well. If you want freakout movie music, psychedelic dream pop, or avant garde experiments, they got it all.

It is a bit frustrating for me that their biggest hit was "Come On Let's Go", which i have to count as probably my least favorite song of theirs. Not only does it not represent the guts they had, but it sounds like a compromise, something i am confident they never partook in.

but that's what makes them great. here is a band who could make a pop hit, then go off and do something like "Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age", an album i would rather be mauled to death slowly by a pack of rabid wolves than consider living without. Of course, there were quite a few years between "Come On" and "Witch Cults", and its almost like juxtaposing "I wanna hold your hand" with "Sargeant Pepper". It simply didn't give you any clue as to where this band was gonna go.
If i could force anyone to spend some time with one record, i would choose that one. There have been a few times with friends, late at night out in my outdoor psychedelic living room with the colored lights going and some good weed, and this record will be on and in one of the spooky moments someone will say, with a shiver, "Wow, this is really psychedelic". The way they say it always has a twinge of the fear in it, like how you feel when you are standing on the verge of a good hallucinogen. and the fact that Broadcast do this without relying on any of the trappings of the neo-psychedelisists like sitars or moany long-winded "The End" send-ups is quite amazing. For all their worship of The United States of America, french pop (Trish called Clothilde's sole LP her favorite album of all time and yes, it is bloody fantastic) and the sixties in general, no band in my mind has made those influences their own so deeply as they did while sidestepping the Antiques-Roadshow syndrome of so many sixties revisionists. Even in their early, Stereolab-worshipping days, they always came off as completely their own thing. The territory they traversed is completely their own.

i recently heard a radio show from 2011 available on the archive.org, called "Goodbye Girl", which was a tribute to Trish after her death and also a look at the whole West Midlands hauntology "scene", if you want to call it that. Apart from the songs by Plone, Pram, and the older stuff (Basil Kirchen, the aforementioned USA etc), all the new bands they played absolutely blew. Then they would play a song by Broadcast and you were just blown away by how more fully realized their sound was. And not once did they mention the Ghost Box label, which just goes to show you how little they knew. The Focus Group is by far the best band on that label, but Belbury Poly are pretty good, and Hong Kong in the Sixties have a number or two that are decent. But Focus Group's "Sketches and Spells" is just gobsmacking, an essential companion to "Witch Cults", which Julian House (EXCELLENT graphic designer and cofounder of Ghost Box and sole man behind Focus Group") collaborated with them on.

Of course, then she had to go off and fucking DIE, leaving a legacy unsung and so much work yet to be done. Yes, there was the soundtrack (fucking BRILLIANT) to "Berberian Sound Studio" and James Cargill (whom yes, i will admit to having a bit of a crush on, he IS a handsome lad) is putting together one last Broadcast LP from the tapes Trish left behind, which has to be a heartbreaker. Your woman and your band mate is dead and you get to stay behind curating. It takes alot of brawn to heft a load like that. I will buy twenty copies when it comes out, even if it is the worst record ever made.

In the meantime, go and have a read at this. And if you are reading this, go and buy pretty much every damn thing this band ever did, and start with "Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age' and don't say I never did you any kindnesses. That is all.

the charm of the earnest

i have a new addiction. musical websites belonging to extraordinarily ordinary people.

I work as an assistant for a pro-audio reseller, and while looking up info one day about Omnichords (you gotta love you some Omnichords) i found a charming, and yes, archaic website belonging to an older fellow who repairs and teaches classes on these weird little machines.

If you aren't familiar with an Omnichord, its sort of a user friendly electronic harpsichord with Casio underpinnings. You know what i mean- its got the built-in synth "waltz" beats, horrible yet wonderful electronic equivalents of things like flutes and trumpets- and its "FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!"

Yes, really. 

The above is just one example of this family-friendly ethos that spawned quite a little library of horribly inappropriate (at least on my own snooty rarified esthetic grounds) songbooks aimed at middle America (and Canada too, probably). Its pretty bizarre considering this is the same instrument that can be heard in songs by people like (the beloved) Broadcast, Antenna, and Stereolab, to name a few... the same instrument that might just now, be accompanying a little old church choir in say, Florida. 

But I digress. 

The websites. 

Its an entirely new world for me. But I find people really the most fascinating thing of all. I have always been interested in true crime and the MOST fascinating thing for me has always been the victims, the little details of their lives, the things that perhaps led them to wind up on that street corner or at that bar on just That Night. In fact, if ordinary people wrote more books about their lives, that is probably all I would ever read. Nothing is too boring for me. I like hearing all the mundane details, where they grew up, their perspective on things like, say, UFOs, or physics, or Divine Judgement. Ordinary people are actually not at all ordinary. I discovered that after years of working at gas stations in the south- every one, but everyone, is interesting, but they just don't know it. 

So, when you have someone who thinks of themselves as ordinary, who writes songs that you and I know (in our infinite and questionable wisdom) will never make the top 40, and then they make a website, what you have is a weird little corner of the Internet Multiverse. Its like the worldwide web equivalent of song poems- those "for a fee" songs that are being collected now by more obviously weird people like myself. Listen to 20 or 30 of those in an evening and regular music will start to sound patently ridiculous and even uninspired. Songs like "Moon Men" or "Jimmy Carter Says Yes" or "Octopus Woman Let Me Go"....songs written by people who work 9-5 for 30 years and raise families and tap out tunes on their Omnichords or Casios and write weird little poems that rhyme in clumsy ways... but somehow the end result is a weird kind of genius, completely and utterly devoid of guile, irony, or conventional talent. 

So I have been spending a good chunk of my free time just wandering around, looking for the right websites to turn that crank. A dead giveaway is really bad, Windows-95-era graphics. You know, the Angelfire-free-website-era graphics. Comic Sans font, some adverts placed at the bottom for cheaper insurance, choppily-scrolling pages, and of course, heaps of grammatical errors. 

It must be said, if it is not obvious, that I am not looking for comedy here. I am not laughing heartily at the stupidity or lack of sophistication of Joe Six Pack. I actually find it alot more interesting than the self-absorbed, esoteric hepster ramblings of someone who is a bit more "tuned in". I WANT to hear the thoughts and see the creativity of people who have, honest to god, probably have never even heard of the Velvet Underground. I already KNOW what people like ME think, pretty much- i have inhabited that landscape my whole life. And I live in Los Angeles, at an artist's collective and underground venue. I get vast boatloads of Hep and Irony on my plate every day. Something in me cries out sometimes for the ordinary, the naive, the guileless, for those that don't know any better. I find it supremely restful. 

A wonderful example of this is ...THIS....

and this...

and this.

The great thing about websites like the above is that they sometimes venture into some off-key territory.  Check this out....see jesus in a rorshach.

Or a woman suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder.

There is also the weird subset of websites that are "faith-based". Some of these are even better examples of what I am talking about, drenched in earnest appeals and canned piano gospel, with the occasional political diatribe thrown in for good measure. 

Again, this is not a clever mock, more like a sociological study. Do such people ever peer over the fence at US, the artsy, techy, above-it-all-types who salivate over Suicide boxsets and Can rereleases and blog about it on our Macs? Are they disturbed, or interested, or consider us godless? Have we all gotten too sophisticated, a little too steeped in our genre-fication and false depths? 

Then again, some of it is pretty funny. And we probably are godless, compared to Peggy. 

Summer, Missing

photos from the california backcountry, near yosemite, 2012- lost with family in a golden valley. i miss them.

Berberian Sound Studio

I have never waited with such anticipation on a film in my entire life. The concept, the soundtrack (beloved Broadcast), the whole giallo/library overtone-all of it was like porn, appealing to me on an almost animal level. Naturally, with such a buildup, there is bound to be disappointment, but I am happy to say that it is not nearly of the nature I expected.

First off, you should know, THE ENDING SUCKS. There are a few things in history I would change, and this is one of them. Its almost unimaginable that such brilliance would end so unexpectedly, as if a reel were missing, but it did, and one is left with the rest of the film, which is no small consolation.

But up until that time, I have to say, I was utterly in thrall. Completely. I must use the word "porn" again as nothing else quite captures the salivating glory of seeing all those old sound machines, echoplexes, tape machines, VU meters, all the up-close-electronic ephemera interspersed with Broadcast's brilliant (HEAVILY brilliant) music. I mean, kill me, I die happy. My pulse would race when the frame would go black and all you could see was a red flash- "SILENZIO". Never in my life has a film been as delicious, as made-to-order for my own fascinations as this one. I was so enthralled that when the film ended it was like being upended out of a warm bed in the middle of the night with a flashlight in your face. Ergo, i was a bit pissed.

But no matter. It satisfied even MORE than i thought it would, all the actors were brilliant, Toby Jones is fantastic, every frame is fantastic, except the end, and if it were food, I would have three courses of it and sneak to the fridge in the middle of the night in secret. Probably the only other film i can think of that I felt the same way for was "Performance", with its spooky overtones and nervous breakdowns and  black legacy. It has definitely inflamed my desires, and i want nothing more out of life than to work with sound and vintage machines and see tape spool and spin on spindles in the middle of the night in a basement in a dodgy sound studio. that night world of vintage technology, the smell of solid state electronics, the hiss of the tape heads.

Radio Show-Night Fall's "The All Nighter"

A more recent radio show, i think from the late seventies.
"Night Fall" is a Canadian radio show that lasted for about a 100 episodes and is probably my second favorite series of all time. The shows tended to be a little weirder and stayed pretty clear of crime-drama territory, instead focusing on "Twilight-Zone"-esque scenarios. There are many favorites from this series but I find this one one of the most unsettling.

The plot concerns an actress who also works nights in a 24-hour laundry. She notices a very strange man enter one night, and then disappear- and then discovers human flesh in the washing machine. Its one of those "WTF" plots that "NightFall" seems so fond of, and its actually unsettling besides. Download it here.

Radio Show - Inner Sanctum's "The Lonely Sleep"

Going to cultivate the habit of uploading my favorite creepy radio shows. Its a great sport for me to dig up forgotten series and listen to all of them and find the very best ones. I tend to get excited at new discoveries anyway, so I want to make a point of sharing and reviewing these.

It should be said that I never listen to anything other than suspense/horror OTRs, and maybe sometimes a bit of sci-fi (tho i find it dull). The holy Grail is always to find something actually frightening, but ghoulish/noir will do as well.

For the former I have no better example than the episode of Vanishing Point that I have posted on here, "Snow Shadow Area". If i could rent radio time, and play that 12 hours straight so that everyone gets scared out of their mind, i would. i'd like to see that one become a classic- its so incongruous, to find something like that and it be so unknown. its like seeing Larry Olivier in dinner theatre in Florida. Its still on here, if you are into it, go download it.

This one falls into the "ghoulish/noir" category. "The Lonely Sleep" is an unusual entry for "Inner Sanctum", a show that excelled at promising more than it delivered. Experts in hyperbole, the show has become a bit of a classic, and i think its just because of sheer numbers. Thousands of episodes were produced while superior shows like Night Fall only did about a hundred. They simply outweigh most other series and i have found the vast majority of them to be simply overbaked crime dramas. But this time, it actually gets really weird, unbelievably weird actually, at least for the time. Hell, for any time.

The story concerns a lonely young bachelor who can't stand to be laughed it. He eases his pain by spending time with his mannequins, and by mannequins, we mean, hmmm. Weird parallels between this character and Dennis Nielsen, the English serial killer whose motive could be summed up as "Killing for Company". Again, this one really gets a bit ghoulish and i bet the switchboards lit up after this one was aired, and the kiddies had a few nightmares.

Something about this show is so clammy, so dark, its like finding one of those lurid "Hollywood Confidential" mags from the late 1940's about the Black Dahlia-all grainy and ghoulish and darker than you would think- and the pages are all crumbling and you feel like you need to wash your hands afterward. Naturally it strains credibility and the acting is over the top and all that, but still, its good spooky fun and you can get it HERE.

When an artist becomes a scientist, and then, a wizard

it is with great satisfaction that i report the near-finish of my first semester of college with straight A's and an entirely more fulsome (and fascinating) aspiration- to become an electrical engineer.

its a very interesting experience, to be the person that i am, walking into this sort of world. electronics have fascinated me my whole life, but i was always frightened of it. and a scientific pursuit never occurred to me, in a million years. i had studied surveying for a brief time at a tech school, but the only other serious aspiration i ever pursued (that one would need a degree for) was french translation. art and the sheer act of creating always had a higher pull on me and always made it easy for me to just throw the conventional path aside and frankly i PREFERRED learning on my own. i always figured that i would just be an idiot savant for the rest of my life, an autodidact who learned in her own way, who pursued many paths but never strayed too far into the scientific realm.

so it is with great interest that i find out how INTERESTING and BIZARRE the world of technology and especially electronics is. i am delighted to learn that no one really KNOWS what current is, or why a transistor works. all engineers and scientists know is how current behaves. they know that a transistor can amplify. but they don't know why. they can only hypothesize and direct it.

and the fact that current is present everywhere, even within our bodies, can be somewhat tamed and observed reliably, does not diminish the weirdness of harnessing a mysterious force. and of course, the SOUNDS- the sounds are of prime importance. i could very well see focusing on sound exclusively, and the building of both sound and visual instruments has been on my mind for some time now. it is what pushed me into this field.

when i look at the trajectory, i realize that the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and to an even greater degree, Broadcast, had everything to do with this bend in my aesthetics. combining the pastoral, the spooky and the electronic into one really upended much of where i was before then. there was this since of wanting to live in the past that i have completely abandoned. there is this realization that the new does not have to leave behind the past, and can combine with a wholly psychedelic future. that really led to me embracing technology in a way that is almost childlike. the fact that i became married to my laptop since i started making films didn't hurt either. i realized that things were possible that my archaic aesthetics had never considered before. that, while i may have wanted to live in 1966, i couldn't have done nearly what i had accomplished artistically in those days that i could now. all of that led into discovering a treasure trove of electronic (NOT HOUSE, or TECHNO) music, and that led into wanting to build instruments, learning about circuit bending, and then signing up for an electronics certificate, and then really finding out what it means to be an engineer and work with truly mysterious, yet concrete forces.

in our lab one day in school, we made a two tone oscillator. it just brought it all home for me like a ton of bricks. hearing those tones emanating out of all those breadboards delighted me. i heard the silver apples and broadcast and stereolab in those tones. even watching the humble LED's light up when you wire something right makes me reel with delight. HERE is something that you can sink your teeth into. this isn't like parapsychology or the occult or literature or art. it isn't speculative. it isn't abstract. it is a mound of immutable laws wrapped in riddles. it is a toy that you can play with, a color you can paint with. it makes sound and it can make things light up. it can detect and spin and do what you tell it, when you speak its language. and its language is in resistors and ohm's law and potentiometers and schematics. its a SCIENCE, and science can be an art- but art cannot be a science. it can only be informed and shaped by science. art is all variables, all possibilities. if a circuit were purely art, it could not transmit its information. there is an exactitude, a sense of having to work on the Force's terms, which i find intoxicating. i have to be BENT into that shape. i can't just flow around it and "intuit" it. it demands study and everything done correctly. but when you do that, you can create something completely unique, and truly artistic.