The Belbury Circle – Outward Journeys (2017)

I thought I had heard something similar to this before

Now I remember

I really think Shane and Ryan need to get in touch with the Hellier group because they're spritbox method is so good, and I really think Shane would enjoy it from a skeptics pov.

Basically the Hellier group has it set up so one person wears noise canceling headphones and can ONLY hear the spirit box, while other people in the group ask questions. When something comes thru on the box, the person with the headphones calls it out.

Basically it prevents any subconscious bias coming thru on what you may or may not hear, kwim?

Wednesday 20 September Mixtape 374 “Summer Stone”

Experimental Library Instrumental Wednesdays, Fridays & Sundays. Support the artists and labels. Don't forget to tip so future shows can bloom.

Secret Circuit-Ripe Ready 00:31

Pneumatic Tubes-Summer's End 04:49

The British Stereo Collective-In the Tall Grass (from The Ghosts of Fleet Forest) (New Mix) 06:29

Pete Jolly-Leaves 07:43

Oscar Rocchi, Franco Godi-Fantastica 09:20

Piet Van Meren-Stoned 11:40

Satoshi & Makoto-Crawl Up 14:06

The Sorcerers-The Horror 16:49

Peel Dream Magazine-You Really Mean It? 20:26

Roedelius-Sonnengeflecht 21:22

Moon Mullins-Over the Marine Parkway Bridge 24:36

Belbury Poly-Earth Lights 28:23

Bravo Tounky-La Bonnette 32:45

Trevor Bastow-Chopping Block 35:28

Soundtrack to that night when, just for larks, Gary Numan and Giorgio Moroder decided to sneak into MI-6 HQ and actually got away with it. Later they walked over to Vauxhall Bridge to watch the misting rain and bask in their cleverness…both in long coats, gray hats, smoking cigarettes.

The rain got heavier, so Numan produced from his coat pocket two tiny collapsible umbrellas that somehow expanded to full size.

“Sorprendente!” Moroder whispered.

“Bob’s your uncle,” Numan replied.

Heavy footsteps in your attic means a spectre telepathic

Been thinking a lot about hauntological things lately, especially vis-a-vis 90s electronic music due to this compilation I reviewed. And I also did a little essay for State51's Greedmag, about the Ghost Box reissues and what it all means. The mag is sold out, so reposting the text here.

👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

When the Ghost Box label arrived it seemed, appropriately enough, like an apparition. Springing out of nowhere with its perfectly realised audio, visual and phrase making aesthetic, it was an uncanny (or unheimlich as its fans loved to say) weird and wobbly echo of the British past. It melted together drizzle on the downs with Pelican books, municipal library leaflets, Ceefax, public information films, folk horror, the Radiophonic Workshop, local news segments about mummers and morrismen, trippy bits of the avant garde that got slotted into odd cracks in TV programming: things which in the mid 00s seemed so very far away in a distant, misty past. These references came, after all, from a time before websites, before rave and jungle, before lads’ mags and EasyJet: from The Old Days. 

It's funny, then, listening to those first few Ghost Box releases, when they’re ticking towards two decades old themselves: steadily approaching being as old now as some of their references were when they were made. First up, very pleasingly, they still sound deeply weird. The gently disturbing folk melodies played on rudimentary retro synthesisers on Belbury Poly’s first EP and album, and the tiny disjointed collages of half-glimpsed children’s TV scenes, hippie films and rituals on The Focus Group’s Sketches and Spells retain all their power to open up little portals to parts of your mind you didn’t even know existed, to pasts you’re not sure whether you ever experienced or not. Second, and perhaps even stranger, they sound less archaic and perhaps less kitsch than when they first emerged.

There are reasons for this. First of all, it’s worth noting that, although the way it turned up fully formed with artwork, music and website all as one gesamtkunstwerk could make it seem so, Ghost Box didn’t materialise out of a vacuum. Aside from obvious contemporary allies like Broadcast and Trunk Records, the sense of a historically deep British folklore blurring into the eeriness of pre-digital-era pop culture was humming in the background already. Julian Cope’s The Modern Antiquarian had come out in 1998, its pages laid out and mock-faded to look like a 60s/70s guidebook, mysticism and mischief interwoven throughout it. Coil’s turn of the millennium output too – notably the Musick to Play in the Dark series – brought together English pastoralism, dark futurism, deep-dive psychedelia, old synthesisers and a commitment to being deeply disconcerting.

Musically you could hear precursors to Ghost Box in 90s electronica outliers like Plaid and Ultramarine, and in oddball retro ephemera collagists like Solex, Tipsy and People Like Us. And on the fringes of folktronica in the early 00s, acts like Tunng, Colleen and Neotropic were likewise using technology to open up cracks that let stranger parts of the past leak out. But looking back, now that all of this stuff is the past, maybe it’s a little bit less defined by its source material than we thought at the time. Maybe this wasn’t just about accosting the past in its weirdness and absurdity, but filtering, preserving and channelling it forwards, making sure that the chosen parts continued haunting the future?

Remember, this was a time of a very dramatic material shifting in relationship to the past. From 1999 Napster – quickly followed by AudioGalaxy, LimeWire and the rest – presented the opportunity to access a vast swather of recorded music, and what you couldn’t find there you could increasingly on specialist blogs. At the start of 2005, just before these first Ghost Box releases, the launch of YouTube marked the first creak in the opening of the floodgates for video too. Even though internet was still creaky by today’s standars, you could still discover an obscure artist and have their entire discography within hours. 

All of this led to bafflement, derangement, even anxiety. Received wisdom in mainstream – and even much alternative – culture media was that this glutting would lead to a homogenisation or levelling of culture. Everything being available all at once meant there was no longer a clear distinction between populist and underground, new niche aesthetics would not be able to develop before they were assimilated, it was, perhaps, a cultural End of History. And in a sense this was true. Certainly, to the horror of inky press commentators who’d earned well from the certainties of the post-1950s definitions of youth culture and subculture, there was no “new rock’n’roll”. There was no new punk, no new acid house, no single sound that rewrote the rulebook. 

Of course, change hadn’t come to a halt. The future was just increasingly, in William Gibson’s unforgettable phrase “unevenly distributed”. Cultural evolution was no longer defined by single radical paradigm shifts in a single, central pop culture, but rather moving forwards in syntagmatic shifts: the piecing together of what would become new traditions. This is the reason young people today talk in terms not of genres or scenes, but “aesthetics”. And this is where we come back to our folktronicists and hauntologists: in this everything-all-at-once deluge we needed people to coalesce aesthetics that we could cling on to. 

When Belbury Poly mapped harpsichords onto analogue bass, or made audio allusions to Delia Derbyshire and John Baker, they were reinforcing connections, between fey psyche pop, cartoons, dramas, leaflets, animated geometry from 5am Open University broadcasts, in the way that synapses are strengthened during dreaming. The same when The Focus Group created micro fragments that were Polish Jazz, Italian horror, Dr Who and J Dilla all at once: this was creating a grammar of weirdness, a very specific binding together of sound, image and idea that could withstand the surge of undifferentiated information swirling around it in the outside world. These records didn’t just create sounds that still sound good now, they didn’t just set a grammar of peculiarity in motion that echoes through today via all kinds of odd internet moments and disparate creations from Scarfolk to chillwave. They also gave us a toolkit: a post-postmodern set of methods for coherently blending together the our hyperspecific special interests into new essences and letting them leak forward into the future, unleashing brand new hauntings. 

The New 2023 Version of the P-SB7T Spirit Box with Temperature Display.  Now with AM Boost, Temperature Detection/Display, Amplified Sound, Red Backlit Screen, Flashlight, Lanyard and pouch

For Sale: Unique Ghost Box

“Portraits of my Friend” is a six sides box, hand painted, and one of a kind. It’s available on Etsy (https://www.etsy.com/shop/HaylanMakesStuff). Each side of the box and the inside are completely different from one another!

It’s an upcycled box, with acrylic and colored pencil to create the design. I wanted to consider what a ghost would do while they spend all their time trapped in the haunted house to which they are bound. 

It opens up to reveal 4 little box containers inside. 

I have really enjoyed creating all the Halloween boxes and clocks in the last few years, and I really, really an in love with this one. 

#37: The Soundcarriers - Boiling Point

Released: 7"- 12 Sep 2012 ; Video Release - 21st Apr 2014

Highest UK Chart Position - Did not chart

Spotify streams to date: 149,946

First Heard - On re-release, 2014

I can remember Soundcarriers records from before this and, while they weren’t exactly bad, they did feel quite tame: coming off like reheated psychedelia, they had a distinct “Seekers joining a drug cult” vibe. In comparison, Boiling Point goes a lot harder, sounding more like they’ve taken over the movement completely and dumped acid in the local water supply. Their music was always built around revivalism, but this single gave their take on the late 60s more of a retrofuturist aspect, subtly throwing in some modern ideas which fit with the project so well that you might never notice the joins. The result is a kind of pop as head music, something catchy enough to be extremely addictive while having a kind of hypnotic whip-crack about it that could leave you staring blankly into space for hours at a time.

Once you get past the swirling drones of the intro, the drums are the thing that immediately jump out at you. Obviously it’s a kind of motorik beat but rather than recreating a live drum sound, it feels weirdly artificial, decaying in a uniform way as it drifts back under the mix, before cutting through hard again like something puncturing sheet metal. Alongside the loops of noise that form its nagging, almost ugly hooks, these elements have more in common with electronic music than a standard psych-pop act. But those 60s tropes are all here too, especially the coven-like male/female vocals and the heady musical swirl that threatens to swamp them: in what feels like an attempt to recreate the vibe of a trip itself, all of the song’s queasy energy and hurtling momentum is set against the sound of a choir singing calmly from the centre of the cyclone. While there has already been (and will continue to be) plenty of good old-fashioned nostalgia in this list, Boiling Point’s commitment to the bit does rather single it out. But its greatness comes from how it catches a band as they start to transcend their reference points, moving into more turbulent and interesting waters.

Jon Brooks • Autres Directions (Clay Pipe Music / Cafe Kaput, 2017)

One of my favorite tropes is when you have a character go through a majorly unsettling event of some kind that leaves them rattled but they still have to talk to someone afterwards. at a loss for coherent thought they just say a few relevant words and then go silent for someone else to take the lead.

I was reading over a later scene in girl in the graveyard where kaz essentially has to deal with a scary ghost librarian to get the info she needs on who’s haunting her, and ends up in a sort of. Pocket ghost dimension of archived files and preserved documents stretching far beyond what the library basement should ever be. But the ghost librarian is helpful, even if she’s terrifying and also mean, and kaz walks away with a box of death certificates and newspapers.

Having just survived her first major foray into whatever the fuck that was, she presents the box to Josie and says distantly, “ghost box.”

“ghost box?”

Kaz nods. “Ghost box.”

We ask about family. Listen to the reaction.

YOUNG DOLPH Spirit Box! - “Beef with Yo Gotti” (CLEAREST Ghost Box)

Belbury Poly - new album The Path out today. Tumblr won't embed Soundcloud widgets anymore, so here is the promo video instead:

The Path is the latest album from Belbury Poly (aka Ghost Box records founder Jim Jupp). This time round Jupp has recruited a full band roster to expand his own unique electronica. He is joined by occasional Belbury Poly collaborator Christopher Budd on Bass and Guitar, Jesse Chandler (of Midlake, Mercury Rev & Pneumatic Tubes) on flute, clarinet and keyboards, Max Saidi on drums plus narration from author and poet, Justin Hopper. Musically it takes as its starting point a particular moment of early 1970s British film soundtracks by the likes of Roy Budd and Roger Webb; a soundworld of easy-going jazz and funky rhythms gently coloured with pastoral strings and flutes. The Path, however, is unmoored from time or place thanks to Hopper’s narrative style, Chandler’s rustic flutes and keys, Budd’s soulful psychedelic guitars and Jupp’s production and electronics. Hopper's words form a loose, open-ended narrative and it's not just a continuous reading. The vocal passages are interspersed at intervals in a very musical way amongst the instrumental passages. It's very much an album with spoken word rather than a spoken word album. Artwork by Julian House and liner notes by Justin Hopper, the vinyl version includes a free download code card. CD and digital versions also include four instrumental versions of spoken word tracks.

Wednesday 6 September Mixtape 365 “Nueva Frequencies”

Synth Electronica Wednesdays, Fridays & Sundays. Support the artists and labels. Don't forget to tip so future shows can bloom.

Sophos-Nueva vida 00:31

SW.-Untitled B1 05:15

Gidge-Fauna, Pt II 10:46

The Science Fiction Corporation-The End of the Robot 17:55

Jonathan Fitoussi-Orion 20:12

Belbury Poly-Sticks and Stones 23:37

Emeralds-Does It Look Like I'm Here? 27:03

Psyché-Hekate 32:02

John Beltran-Collage Of Dreams 36:37

Caterina Barbieri-Sufyosowirl 42:02

Luke Abbott-Modern Driveway - Mixed 47:27

Dark fidelity HiFi-soft focus 52:37

Eden Grey-Grey Rain and Silver Clouds 57:22

Norken-More Frequencies 1:01:28

Welcome to The Ghost Box, a new podcast where hosts Kabyl and Thyme discuss whatever strikes their fancy.

In this pilot episode we talk about the first film in the Mad Max series and all the luck and difficulty that went into its production, a full rundown of the film's events, its critical and general reception, as well as some trivia here and there.

Thanks for stopping by and we hope you enjoy!

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Subscribe for more! : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyLm-cy4j5RYFqyxrn36f_w

Check out our Let's Play Channel! : https://www.youtube.com/c/BasicKabyl

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