Children Of Alice

Originally published as a Warp Records press release for the debut LP by Children of Alice.



Children of Alice have been quietly producing amorphous and intoxicating soundscapes as part of the Folklore Tapes collective for a number of years now, beginning in 2013 with Harbinger of Spring on the shared Ornithology release. This poetic conjuration of rebirth and new growth was the first unfurling of post-Broadcast creation from James Cargill, one half of the personal and artistic relationship at the heart of that epochal and increasingly feted band. The name Children of Alice was chosen as an act of tribute to the late Trish Keenan, for whom Alice in Wonderland and in particular Jonathan Miller’s summerhazy 60s idyll of an adaptation, was a presiding inspiration. The name invokes her abiding spirit and also creates a sense of continuity with the evolving Broadcast soundworld, which became more concentrated and individual as it refined itself and adapted to new configurations. The group (or perhaps we should call them a collaborative triad, since they occupy island territory far removed from the familiar shores of rock, though still keeping it in vision on the far horizon) consists of Cargill along with his former bandmate Roj Stevens (who played keyboards in Broadcast) and Julian House, co-founder of Ghost Box records, whose distinctive graphic design work also gives the label its signature look, and hidden prestidigitator behind The Focus Group.

Both Stevens and Cargill lent their incubating musical presence to the 2013 Focus Group album Elektrik Carousel, and a fully-fledged collaboration was hatched with the Ornithology record a few months later. Stevens had released a solo record on Ghost Box in 2009, The Transactional Dharma of Roj Stevens, whose clicking and ratcheting clockwork rhythms suggested the cogs and teeth of complex interlocking machineries and automata set into keywound or water-powered motion. He brings a similar sensibility to the recordings here, creating an impression of irregular, juddering forward motion, a Heath-Robinsonesque progression. House is a concrète collagiste, his assemblages torn by abrupt a deliberately rough-edged jump-cuts, audio analogues of his visual work. Cargill’s warm synth colours infuse the whole with sustaining solar radiance, and bass lines redolent of the Broadcast duo LP Tender Buttons occasionally rise to the surface before drifting off on the mercurial flux of transformative sound. Julian House had previously collaborated with James Cargill on the album Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate the Witch Cults of the Radio Age, and Children of Alice further explore and expand upon these researches (and those carried out on the Mother is the Milky Way tour CD). These are sound pictures whose discrete movements, organically morphing musical matter and sudden transitions produce a sense of passage through a kaleidoscopically refracted panorama and form a narrative of journeys into inner landscapes. The sound world is gently psychedelic, full of backmasked tapes, phased flutes and analogue hum. Clocks and birds chime and twitter, processed autoharps and glockenspiels glint and shimmer, woodblocks and hand-drums plock and patter.

The music the Children of Alice triad make is impossible to narrowly define. It dissolves the limiting boundaries between field recordings, musique concrète, electronica, programmatic classical music, psych folk, experimental rock, radiophonic sound, library cues, hip-hop sampling and imaginary soundtracks. These four pieces (songs or tracks seem inadequate handles to define them) are pastoral concrète, a romantic English modernism (for, to answer Paul Nash’s rhetorical question, it IS possible to go modern and be British) which replaces brutalism and the clashing bruitage of the city with birdsong, folk chatter and the sundappled buzz and hum of a summer’s afternoon (shades of XTC’s Summer’s Cauldron, with its ‘insect bomber Buddhist droning’) and hedgerow bricolage. There is an inherent lightness to these sound pictures, a feeling of expansiveness and joyful exploration. Inner and outer worlds meet, and the divide between them becomes indistinct and, in the end, irrelevant.

Harbinger of Spring is the lengthiest pieces here, a sonic suite which guides us through a varied terrain, its successive sections like rooms in a spatially transcendent mental mansion, interiors and landscapes interpenetrating like one of Paul Nash’s surreal rooms, lapped by oceanic edges and lit by pendant moons. Beginning with cuckoo sounds which spring from carved, concertinaed clock automata to transform into woodland heralds of the turning season, this playful pastoral tone poem evokes both post-war electronic and electroacoustic composers such as Jonathan Harvey, Trevor Wishart (the morphing of human agonies into bird choruses in the immensely powerful Red Bird), Bernard Parmegiani and Pierre Henry, and British composers such as Benjamin Britten with his Spring Symphony (Broadcast had already drawn on Britten’s music for their song Echo’s Answer) and the Delius drift of reveries like The Walk to the Paradise Garden and In A Summer Garden. Messiaen’s Catalogue D’Oiseaux piano pieces are also a point of comparison, their field-notated birdsong imitations set within musical evocations of landscape, weather and seasonal climate. The fact that comparisons from the classical and avant-garde worlds are easier to draw than examples from the realms of rock and pop indicates the sui generis nature of Children of Alice’s music. There really is nothing else like this being produced at the moment.

Harbinger of Spring set the pattern for subsequent releases in the Folklore Tapes Calendar Customs series – a harbinger of the seasonal tone-poems to come. The Liminal Space from FTCCI Fore Halloween, Rite of the Maypole – An Unruly Procession from FTCCII: Merry May and Invocation of a Midsummer Reverie from FTCCIV: Crown of Light summon up the spirit of seasonal rites and traditions, whether as remembrance, reproduction or ongoing observances. Landscape, time and ritual are inseparable, and these pieces are full of the spirit of an age in which the seasons of man and the cycles of the pastoral year were in close synchrony. The nature of the music makes the substance of time malleable, folding it in and stretching it out, moulding it until it becomes immaterial, eternal. Only timelessness remains, a process of perpetual becoming, recession and renewal; but never an ending or a beginning.

Elements of these pieces trigger associative responses, particularly from those Broadcast fans attuned to the influences Trish and James have promulgated over the years through mixes and interview effusiveness. A revving motorcycle engine brings The Owl Service to mind; cracking flagellations and ‘orgy vocals’ Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and David Vorhaus’ White Noise track My Game of Loving; swooping sirens and agitated voices the public information films which portrayed a world in which fatal danger was everpresent in the seemingly ordinary and everyday; singing, glassy sonorities the unearthly calls of Les Sculptures Sonores; the ratcheting clogs of a large clock, with its imprisoning linear temporality, the mechanism which features in the Angela Carterish Czech fairytale fantasy Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (a firm favourite of Trish’s); and are those stridulating creaks and boings the sound of Froglets, making a surprise visitation from the soup-rich asteroid of The Clangers? These associations (and many more particular to the individual auditor) all add to the richness of the experience. For these are condensed and multi-layered soundworlds which bear repeated listening. They are unique works of singular imagination, and this first LP by Children of Alice is an extraordinarily inventive work. May it be a harbinger of many further explorations and investigations of cults and rituals, inscapes and landscapes, the temporal and the transcendental to come. Meanwhile, lay back and immerse yourself in these transformative sonic poems, take the hands of the Children of Alice and let your mind drift and come into sudden sharp focus as they lead you into undreamed of yet instantly familiar worlds. Like Alice herself on that hazy summer’s day, dream and wake UP!

The Ghost Box Study Series

Ghost Box Records have just issued the tenth and final instalment of their Study Series. These singles have provided an experimental lab in which established artists on the label have been encouraged to vary their customary style and to collaborate with others, hopefully producing new and pleasing compounds. They have also brought other fellow spirits into the enchanted circle, broadening the house style without diluting its essence. That essence, as ever, extends beyond the music to incorporate the graphic design, the constructed world in which it is placed and the associations which it courts through sample, quotation, pastiche and homage. The covers here have been given a lovely uniform design by Julian House (who also operates under the guise of The Focus Group), lending them the appearance of booklets outlining modules in some esoteric open learning course. It makes for a handsome set. Now that it is complete, it seems an ideal time for a bit of revision to gain an overview of what we have learned in our studies.

The first single is a collaboration between Belbury Poly and Moon Wiring Club and comes under the general heading of Youth and Recreation (each single has its own thematic title). Things get off to a fairly funky start with the A side The Young People. Stevie Wonderish clavichord and disjointed beats beats are overlaid with more typically Ghost Boxy synth melodies in warm, sunfilled analogue tones. A haunted middle section has echoing zither shivers (‘terror zings’ as they’re referred to on the Radiophonic Workshop Out of This World effects LP), ratcheting scrapes like sticks dragged along railings and other murmurations. All of which suggests the approach of the young people with the strangely ‘whitewashed faces’ of which the voiceover speaks. It all ends with ominous, booming synth chords: they’re here, they’re at the door. The B-side, Portals and Parallels, has more beats and bass from the Moon Wiring end of the spectrum. The repeated pattern of a spiralling Belbury theme tune creates zooming false coloured photo title graphics in the mind, suggestive of some supernatural action series. Distorted, half-comprehensible voices can be heard leaking through from some other place. The middle-section shifts into an urgent, John Barry-esque style, which you could imagine being hammered out on a cimbalom (the sound of cold war spy thrillers). An odd, bumbling folk melody in the middle could be the signature of a friendly spirit sidekick, manifesting in order to aid our occult detective in his fight against malevolent forces.

The second single, Cycles and Seasons, teams The Advisory Circle, Jon Brooks’ supervisory body set up to ensure public wellbeing and correct behaviour, with Hong Kong in the 60s. The A side is the Circle alone, offering us New Dimensions In…what exactly? Anything which comes to mind as you listen. It begins with an ascending electronic exhalation, a rising to the surface, tuning us in to a wooden percussive intro of measured clicks. This sets the rhythm for acoustic guitar and gently shuffling drums, which blend with a brassy, sunfilled synthesiser melody. The middle section shifts into the kind of melodic synth music which Paddy Kingsland produced for the Radiophonic Workshop in the mid-70s, mixing electronics with conventional rock instrumentation. It’s one of the first of several Study Series tracks which feels like the soundtrack to a railway journey. The pastoral flute tones which join in towards the end suggests that we are watching the English countryside passing by through the window.

The b-side features Hong Kong in the 60s backed by The Advisory Circle. It’s the first song in the series, and perhaps the first Ghost Box song in the traditional sense. A hazy piece of dream pop with whispered male and female vocals, it drifts along with a sleepy, trance-like pace, lightly shimmying to a background Casio-like bossa rhythm. The half-waking mood is enhanced by the occasional omnichord waft of chordal chime. The lyrics throw out an invitation, a blissfully repeated invocation that ‘everyone come’ to some ritual gathering the nature of which is left worryingly vague. It seems innocent enough, but…

Number 3, Welcome to Godalming, is split between Belbury Poly and fellow astral travellers Mordant Music, who have long investigated similar haunted byways to the Ghost Box artists. Belbury Poly’s Swingalong begins with a sprightly light music intro which, combined with the flickering sound of an unspooling projector, sounds like it might be the soundtrack to a post-war documentary about some sparkling modern new town being shown at the local town hall. It gives way to a relaxed, jazzy and moogy theme tune played over swinging rhythms and watery splashes of stroked electric piano. Noises burble in the background – voices, laughter, vaporous electronic wisps and springing clockwork rasps – paint a blurry impressionistic picture of a paisley-patterned party in full flow. Touches of sitar and tamboura scent the air with the incense of suburban psychedelia.

Mordant Music’s Inn Ohm the Lake has a looping male voice, full of post-war pedagogical assurance, repeatedly informing us that ‘this is only a recording’. Gently humming drone loops and simple, sighing phrases are layered in, sounding a little like Brian Eno’s Discreet Music. Other voices join this underlying mantra, which fades in and out of our consciousness but persists on a subliminal level throughout. A echoing babble builds up around a descending harp-like figure. A children’s round song floating briefly to the surface, emerging from a murmurous mass which is distorted to the point of abstraction. The chorale is dispersed out into slow, edgeless fogs of reverb. It’s like a confusion of calls skimming through the mist on a morning lake, or perhaps rising from more inward pools of the deeper psyche. Single note splashes and warm synth waves are like rain and wind on water.

The fourth instalment finds Broadcast and The Focus Group returning from their investigations of Witch Cults of the Radio Age to turn their attentions to the more domestic subject of ‘Familiar Shapes and Noises’. The title is both accurate and misguiding, since the music delights in the ceaseless warping and transformation of its humble source sounds. There are familiar Broadcast elements embedded in the A side, Inside Out. Trish’s lulling voice is the first sound we hear, and there is a pointillistic piano loop, an archetypal Broadcast (and Brubeck!) bass and rolling drum rhythm, also prominent in the theme for the imaginary film in Berberian Sound Studio. There are chattering harpsichord figures and what sounds like the Mongolian-style lute which Trish used to thrash a furious ethno-Neu drone on at the end of later Broadcast concerts. This gives is something of a North African feel, akin to the psychedelicised recordings of the Master Musicians of Jajouka which Brian Jones brought back from Morocco and subjected to heavy phasing in the 60s. The general tone pushes the experiments of the previous Broadcast and Focus Group collaboration to new and dizzying heights, focussing with intense concentration on making the familiar perpetually strange. The sound is harsher and more distorted, as signalled by a bell chime ruthlessly being pulled out of shape, its purity ground up into a rough grain.

The constant transformations, with tape speed stretched, bending sounds this way and that, compressing and colliding them together, creates an overwhelming effect of sensory overload. We’re never allowed to settle on one singular sound object for sufficient time to gain a firm anchorage within the general flux. This is the kind of psychedelia which Trish used to talk about, the realignment of the sensorium by means of a disorienting rearrangement of the elements of the world into new and startling patterns. For all its intoxicating surface chaos, there’s a real cohesion to the whole, however. Transitions between sounds are made with a seamlessness which is very different from the deliberately ragged collaging of the Witch Cults LP.

The B-side has two short pieces, The Song Before and Tuesday’s Offering. The former features a hazy summer psych buzz and hum, the drone of drowsy heat and bees. Concrete sounds of pouring water and shattering glass add to the atmosphere of daydream detachment. Trish’s song murmurs with beatific self-containment in the background, while bass and occasional guitar twang sustain a forward motion. Massive reverberation gives the impression of visual distortion and kaleidoscopic shifts of focus, whilst a gabbling goblin voice intruding towards the end seems to anticipate the gibber of the Berberian Sound Studio soundtrack’s dangerously aroused homunculus.

Tuesday’s Offering is full of reverse tape effects of the sort which make sounds appear to manifest themselves magically from the substance of the air. Clock chimes, ticks and pendulum swings are savagely morphed and mutated, as if to emphasise the elasticity of time. Set against this mutable temporality are strongly metronomic Can-ish and Pink Floyd-esque bass riffs, which provide a contrasting measured regularity. A voice issuing ceaseless incantation with no apparent pause for breath adds an element of the uncanny. Tuesday’s Offering looks forward to the post-Broadcast which James Cargill has begun producing with Julian House (aka The Focus Group) and Roj Stevens, an ex-Broadcast member and now a Ghost Box artist in his own right, under the name Children of Alice. They have thus far released a striking 20 minute piece on Devon Folklore Tapes which has a definite sense of continuity with this Study Series offering.

For the fifth lesson we delve into The Open Songbook, and enjoy some wryly low key pop by Hintermass. Christened for this single, they are what might be a one off figuration of Jon Brooks (aka The Advisory Circle) and Tim Felton, once of Broadcast and now one half of the pop electronica duo Seeland. The A side, Are You Watching, is initially reminiscent of the latter, with a wistful guitar intro and Casio keyboard rhythms leading into Felton’s reassuring and homely vocals. It’s a pleasingly unaffected slice of light psych pop, reflected and restrained but, all things considered, quietly cheerful and optimistic. The synthesiser whistles along in companionable harmony, and there’s a moogy break near the end which adds a scribble of signature Ghost Box sound. The B-side, So It Shall Be, leads off with wistful piano chords, setting the tone of autumnal minor key melancholia. Felton’s vocals are affectingly ordinary, and the air of everyday heartache and weary resignation is made all the more poignant by the humdrum poetry of tartan flasks in the rain and out of date plastic travel passes. Synth flute lines enhance the flavour of delicious melancholy, whilst background shimmer provides emotional shading.

Jonny Trunk’s Animation and Interpretation, Number 6 in the series, is more minimal in construction. The two sides are skeletal sountracks whose rhythmic emphasis conjures images of movement and travel. The first, Le Train Fantôm, sets the engine in motion with call and response bass and snare drum, and adds more mechanical elements as it accelerates, until it’s picked up a good head of hissing and clanking steam. It never achieves the piston-pumping boiler plate power of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express, but is small and perfectly formed in its own modest way. Indeed, this sounds like a record for playing as an aural backdrop to the running of a model railway. The echoing ‘phantom’ sounds ghosting the rhythms of the rails suggest that this may be a very special set, one with a self-operating nocturnal life of its own.

The B-side, Cardboard Boxford, has a similarly homemade feel. With its plinking triangle and echoed, suspended piano notes and measured, spaced bass, this is movie prowling and searching music, all tension and anticipation as we wait for something to leap out, possibly with a blare of Elmer Bernstein horns. Again, there’s a hollow, miniaturised feel to this soundtrack, something a bit Michael Bentine’s Pottytime about its noirish shadows. The streets of Cardboard Boxford might be mean, but they’re easily flatpacked and stored away.

The seventh record summons up the atmospheres of what must be the favourite Ghost Box season, offering the class some Autumnal Activities to engage in. Side A, November Sequence, finds Pye Corner Audio introducing synthesiser sonorities of a slightly later vintage than the early to mid 70s Ghost Box norm. Broad, expansive chords serves as a steadily pacing ground upon which a simple but hypnotically effective motif is built. Another figure is added on to of that, and the gradually layered counterpoint leads to a cumulative intensification of the listener’s engagement. In minimalist form, ominous effect and in terms of the late 70s sound palette, this has a similar feel to an early John Carpenter title theme – Assault on Precinct 13, say. On the B-side, Cloud Control, Pye Corner Audio join forces with The Advisory Circle. A steady bass and drum beat and minor key chord sequence create the landscape above which a plangent Advisory Circle melody floats with the burnished glow of Autumn sunlight on copper beech leaves. A foursquare snare and bass drum rhythm introduces what sounds like another ghost train winding through the countryside. A minor key middle section introduces darker shadows to the Autumn scene, long nights in which diminished chords conjure threatening, half-glimpsed presences.

Number 8, Inversions, is an exercise in ringing the changes on the familiar and well-established. Belbury Poly and The Advisory Circle (aka Jim Jupp and Jon Brooks) each take one of the other’s tunes and refashion it in their own way, but not necessarily according to their own accustomed style. It’s a congenial exchange, with both participants safe in the knowledge that their music will receive respectful treatment from somebody with an inherent understanding of its spirit. This is a Ghost Box covers single, then, offering interpretations of what are, to a small coterie at least, classics. On the A side, The Advisory Circle arranges The Willows from the Algernon Blackwood-referencing Belbury Poly album of the same name. A fingerstyle acoustic guitar intro with synth flute melody sets up a psych-folk mood, with a similar light pastoral air to Nick Drake’s instrumentals on Bryter Layter. But we soon leave the countryside for the disco, although perhaps this one might be held on the village green, with neon-painted maypole erected. Propulsive Morodery sequenced beats combine with the heavier, metallic springiness of late 70s synth sounds to take Ghost Box out onto the dancefloor. The more familiar warm analogue tones are re-introduced towards the end, sounding fresh and renewed in this altered setting. The groove is maintained on the B-side, on which Belbury Poly effect a similar transformation upon The Advisory Circle’s Now Ends the Beginning from the As The Crow Flies LP. Here, the deliquescent descending motif is rendered as electric piano droplets. A 70s disco drum shuffle dims the ethereal glow of the original in favour a more earthbound ambience, lit by revolving, multi-coloured spotlights. It’s clear and to the point, moving the feet and the body rather than the spirit, with handclaps to co-ordinate moves and create a collective experience. The sense of Pan’s People communion and controlled and directed ecstasy is further expressed by the female ‘la la’ vocals neatly rounding off the chorus with pre-determined ritual precision.

The ninth module, Projections, introduces Listening Center, who perform the A side, Titoli, before combining with Pye Corner Audio to map out the Town of Tomorrow Today. The former has a tinnily preset bontempi rhythm over which simple motifs are placed. On the bottom, a boggy, splodging synth ground hops along with the squelchy bounce of a children’s animated TV theme. The ascending melody drifts overhead with airy nimbus lightness. Sampled female vocals rise in pitch up the synthesiser keys, the evident artificiality of the notes somehow in itself strangely affecting. It’s all so childishly simple, yet creates such a direct, emotional connection. Town of Tomorrow Today begins with a rolling, slightly turbulent synth pattern, perhaps the helicopter approach to our shining urban destination. The grid patterns of the planned and zoned environment is measured out with mellow techno, simple circling chord sequences around which descending melodies are woven. Its repetitive iterations of the basic material with slight variations in tone and structure echo the imaginary modernist architecture which we travel through in our heads.

The final single in the Study Series pairs Belbury Poly with Spacedog, who are Jenny Angliss on vocals, Sarah Angliss on theremin, piano and electronics and Stephen Hiscock on percussion. The record celebrates the mathematical genius, intellectual daring and ‘poetical science’ of Ada Lovelace, Byron’s extraordinary daughter, who imagined the possibilities inherent in the analytical engine which she worked on with Charles Babbage and thus anticipated the modern computer age. On the A-side, Feed Me, we begin with her beautiful statement ‘we are toying with the intangible, the stuff from which the Northern Lights are made’, which shows a profound insight into the spiritual urges at the heart of scientific enquiry. Jenny Angliss’ classically inflected soprano voice echoes Ada’s words (as read by Flora Dempsey) with a lyrical, yearning melodicism reminiscent of parts of Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings or his Rimbaud settings Les Illuminations. There’s also a hint of the North Sea Radio Orchestra in the mix of classical and pop elements. Dub melodica opens up interior spaces and suggests the thought processes which reach towards new ideas and concepts.

If Feed Me depicts the conceptualisation of new possibilities in computation and analogs of mental processes, the B-side, Quiet Industry, presents the mechanical realisation. Ada envisaged the way in which the analytical engine might be used to create complex music beyond the capacity of human musicians to perform. Here, machine rhythms like those in Broadcast’s Hawk drive the music on. The analogy with the Jacquard loom is made, and we hear complex, chattering rhythms incorporating sounds recorded in Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire. With more readings and vocals taken from Ada’s poetic scientific writing woven into the skittering calculations of the machine rhythms in hocketed patterns, the whole bears some resemblance to Steve Reich’s vocal piece Tehillim. Above this complex but intricately ordered polyrhythm we hear a gorgeous synthesiser melody which expresses the beauty of science and the human mind’s efforts to understand the universe through its application. This paean to a female pioneer and prophet of the modern age is a noble, affecting and inspiring lesson with which to conclude our series of studies. Hopefully a new course may be announced in the not too distant future.

Children of Alice on Devon Folklore Tapes

Harbinger of Spring, an 18 minute piece by Children of Alice, was released earlier this week, fortuitously timed to coincide with the long-delayed turn of the season, the sun warming up the English earth at last. It forms one side of the Devon Folklore Tapes Vol.5 cassette, which comes wrapped with typically imaginative and beautifully executed artwork by David Chatton-Barker. I must admit, the revived appeal of cassettes leaves me a bit baffled. They really did seem a redundant medium, made for mangling and hugely frustrating when you’re trying to wind to the beginning of a particular track. Recording on tape is now exponentially more effortful than burning multiple copies of a CD-R, and not noticeably cheaper, so this seems to be creating extra, time-consuming labour in a wilfully perverse manner. But retro-fetishisation knows no bounds, and I’m probably missing some charm inherent in these compact little plastic packages.



This is the first post-Broadcast music by James Cargill. Here, he forms a trio with old Broadcast cohort Roj Stevens and Julian House, Ghost Box co-founder and Focus Group prestidigitator. They have all played together recently, on the Focus Group LP The Elekrik Karousel, released last month. But James and Roj understandably took a more subsidiary role in Julian’s project, lab assistants in his experimental combinations of sounds. Harbinger of Spring forms a more cohesive whole than House’s deliberately fragmented and roughly edited collages. It marks a similar shift to that which could be heard in Broadcast’s Mother is the Milky Way, which took the ideas they’d developed in the Witch Cults of the Radio Age collaboration with the Focus Group and moulded them into a suite of more impressionistic and songlike forms. Harbinger of Spring sees the Children of Alice furthering and refining that line of development, emphasising the gently psychedelic soundworld and the mood of pastoral reverie. There’s certainly a sense of continuity with previous recordings by Broadcast and The Focus Group, and no attempt at a radical break with the past. Nor would their really be any need for such a ruction; there’s still much to explore here, new riches to discover.

The piece has a progressive structure, with various sections clearly delineated from each other, and characterised by their own distinct soundworlds. This makes it feel as if we are being led on a journey, passing through different stages. We begin with mechanical clock chimes, a cuckoo springing forth with a drawn-out, distorted cry which is multiplied to sound like the plaintive cries of estuarine waders. A clipped voice instructing someone to ‘replace your receiver’ suggests a household interior from which the responsible adult is temporarily absent, an impression deepened by the sound of giggling children. We hear a vaguely hummed song, an isolated child crooning to herself. LP surface hiss and crackle is like the hum of warm air, the drifting dust illuminated by the sunlight angling into a sleepy afternoon room. All that follows could be seen as an aural daydream, a mental meander through inner worlds akin to Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole.



Warm synth tones and birdsong move us out of the house and into the garden. From hereon, there’s a pastoral feel to the music, a hazily impressionistic, Delius-like reverie. This transition is cued by chimes and reverse tape effects which evoke that summery psychedelic haze. Electroacoustic autoharp (maybe) and the glinting swell of what sounds like processed harmonium respiration cast bright rays of sunshine upon and set caressing breezes playing across our recumbent forms. Xylophones and flutes sound like birdcalls, in the musically imitative manner of Messiaen (or Beethoven in the Pastoral Symphony, for that matter). Wobbly tape effects, with reels sped up or slowed down, make for birdcall variations. It all goes a bit Clangers for a couple of seconds, too, as if the knitted moondwellers had launched an expedition which landed in an English garden (one of Major Clangers grand projects which didn’t end disastrously, for a change). No doubt the few lucky souls who managed to get their mitts on a tape release in the millisecond before it sold out caught their breath for a moment when first hearing this section, thinking the fragile oxidated ribbon had already wrapped itself around one of the revolving capstans.



A bass drum and cymbal splash paints a picture of something diving and plopping through a watery surface – the garden pond, perhaps. Bubbly sounds take us underwater, where we hear submerged chanting voices, a drowned chorus. A music box seems to be playing a looped fragment of Someday My Prince Will Come, whilst a series of echoing boings conjure the image of a comic, animated frog leaping about, possibly with a crown fixed around his warty bonce. A jokey musical association, perhaps, with fairy tale connotations. Brief, brightly metallic notes struck on a toy piano are like small, darting fish, flashing mercurially across our field of vision.



A cuckoo clock sends its wooden herald concertinaing out of its hatch, marking another transition. We hear the ratcheting sound of wound up gears, a trundling wooden rhythm and percussive clashes, their resonance deadened. It’s as if a toy monkey had suddenly come to life in a haunted playroom, clapping its little cymbals together with manic fixity of purpose. Reverse tape effects once more suck us into the summer psychedelic vortex. The buzzing, drowsy drone with its molecular swirl of overtones evokes the dreamy drift of blossom and down filling the air. I’m reminded of the XTC song Summer’s Cauldron from their season’s cycle LP Skylarking. A cuckoo broadcasts its two note call above the soporific haze, the sound given a somnambulant echo, as if heard though dozing semi-consciousness, and shifted to a minor interval. The music of Delius once more comes to mind, in particular the perennial favourite On Hearing the First Cuckoo In Spring.



The cuckoo, whose call recurs in mechanical, field-recorded and processed form throughout, is the harbinger of spring. Benjamin
Britten uses Edmund Spenser’s poem The Merry Cuckoo in his Spring Symphony, in which the bird is identified as the ‘messenger of spring’. He also includes Thomas Nashe’s Spring, which celebrates the time when ‘Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king;/Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,/Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:/Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!’ The piece concludes with the anonymous 13th century song Sumer is icumen in, familiar to many as the cheerful ditty which the Summer Islanders chant, merrily swaying in time, as they burn poor old Sergeant Howie to death at the end of the Wicker Man. ‘Sumer is icumen in/Laude sing cuckoo’. Britten may very well have been another inspiration here. He’s certainly been mentioned in Broadcast interview of old, and it would certainly be appropriate in this, his centenary year.



A shimmer of electroacoustic autoharp, of the kind which Trish used to play onstage with Broadcast, draws a translucent veil which marks off the permeable divide leading us into the next module. A wavering, plucked motif seems to have subaquatically distorted echoes of Ashes to Ashes, a tiny tear in time through which half-perceived sound of the past have leaked. A bass clarinet adds an ominous note, and a soft bell, initial attack smoothed away as if the clapper were wrapped in felt, begins to toll the progression of time. A descending synth pattern gives the impression of a ringing carillon drifting across the meadows from a church tower, the sound made more ethereal by the acoustic contours of geography and distance. This all draws us back to the preoccupation with bell sounds on the Broadcast LP Ha-Ha Sound, from Minim (‘how sweet the bells’) to the Little Bell (‘it used to ring across the air/It’s sweetened tone would linger there’).



A ratcheting, two-step wooden rhythm is introduced, adding a sense of urgency (as if we were suddenly following the white rabbit, scurrying along with his eyes on his pocket watch). It’s reminiscent of the propulsive flight path of Hawk, the concluding track on Ha-Ha Sound. A deliberate nod to the past, perhaps. More reverse tape effects suggest that we’re being rapidly called back from our reverie, sucked back up the rabbit hole to the waking world. A sprinkle of harp adds a folkish or bardic element, echoing the theme music of The Owl Service (which James and Trish included in a mix for Johnny Trunk’s OST show on Resonance FM a few years back). A line of dialogue from Village of the Damned, George Sanders tensely repeating to himself ‘I must think of a brick wall’, lands us in Midwich. As with the use of a sample in Mother is the Milky Way taken from the Nigel Kneale scripted Hammer film The Witches, also set in an English village, this adds a sinister undercurrent to the bucolic idyll, hinting that there are dark forces at work in the paradise garden.



Liquid bubbling sounds locate us by the pond once more, fishes gaping to the surface. A synth squiggle sounds like a bee buzzing across the stereo spectrum. Everything ends with distorted female vocals, singing a self-absorbed and slightly melancholic refrain. These sound more mature than the girls we heard at the start of the piece. Something has been learned in the course of this kaleidoscopic journey. Alice has woken up from her summer afternoon dreaming, and found herself older, the lonely little girl left somewhere behind.

Well, these were some of the impressions which occurred to me as I listened to this beautiful and carefully crafted piece of music. Happily, you can listen to it yourself, as James has immediately put it up on bandcamp. Close your eyes, put the headphones on and see what pictures it projects inside your mind.

Elektrik Karousel by The Focus Group

The new Focus Group album, Elektrik Karousel, comes with the usual accompanying Ghost Box conceptual packaging, creating a contextual world of the imagination which the music can inhabit. In this case, Julian House, the individual turning the dials behind the Focus Group screen, has designed, along with fellow Ghost Box boss Jim Jupp, an old fashioned board game with a distinctly surrealist cast. The pieces are engravings from old books, and include triple-headed sea gods and louche devils; flayed horses and disembodied ears; anatomical cross-sections of cochlear tracts and optic nerves; plumed helmets and Victorian military medals; cartographer’s dividers and antique playing cards. They look like props from a Jan Svankmajer animation, liable to fill out, flush with colour and come to life at any moment; or elements from one of Max Ernst’s collage novels, waiting to be inserted into a dream tableau.

Caught in the Carousel - Max Ernst's Reve d'une Petite Fille qui Voulut Entrer au Carmel (1930)

The inner sleeve of the LP or the foldaround cover of the CD are illustrated with the trail of squares the players must traverse arranged around a central karousel with its spinning arrow of chance (a dice is clearly not necessary for this game). Corresponding to the track titles, these squares allow for the use of a variety of typographical styles whose associations give the impression that the game’s moves progress backwards and forwards through the decades as much as across the demarcated board space. They also resemble the small ads which might be found at the back of comics, SF magazines or underground music papers. The slightly wonky placement of the squares, along with the deliberate misalignment of the two colour printing, gives a visual cue to the rough aural collages of the record. The cover, with its vaguely op-art black and white patterning, suggests that the whole game could expand into three dimension (either magically or by folding along the dotted lines) and begin to revolve like the barrel of a zoetrope or the mirrored axle of a praxinoscope – in both cases to bedazzling, hypnotic effect, possible depositing the children depicted onto a life-size board whose hazardous labyrinth they must negotiate in order to find their way back to the real world.

Science of the supernatural - Blackwood tributes

Titles are an assemblage of recurrent Focus Group and Ghost Box obsessions. Hope Hodgsone (sic) once more points to a love of British supernatural literature. Algernon Blackwood has already been paid tribute to in the title of The Willows, the Belbury Poly LP whose back cover also bears a quote from the story. Quotes from Welsh writer of weird tales Arthur Machen also grace the covers of two Ghost Box LPs: The Focus Group’s We Are All Pan’s People has a passage from The Great God Pan, whilst Belbury Poly’s The Owl’s Map extracts a description of age old musical ritual from The White People (the title story in Penguin’s recent collection of Machen’s fiction). The capitalised SPOLK looks like a mnemonic acronym, conjuring memories of SPLINK, a similar and rather confusing example urgently delivered by Jon Pertwee in a 70s public information film which tried to inculcate in suggestible children the proper way to cross a road. The Flourescent Host, Skipping Spook (evidently a friendly spirit in the Motley Hall mould) and Wax Phantom are further hauntings, whilst The Heavy Blessing, Flaming Voices and Hoojumany continue the investigations of witch cults begun on the collaborative LP with Broadcast. Various tracks with prominent Ks (the Elektrik Karousel, Kinky Korner Klub and the Kool Kranium) point to a thrilling future of scientism and synthetic living in which the soft and extraneous and extraneously curved C has been eradicated as a needless inefficiency. From a graphic designers perspective, the K also has the naturally dynamic look of a figure putting one elegantly straightened leg forward whilst raising a celebratory arm to propose a toast or wave at an admiring crowd. Finally, More Night Films we can assume to be from the Hammer or Amicus (or even Tigon or Compton) canon, with lashings of Kensington gore, rituals conducted in purple robes, Thames Valley gothic piles and as much exposed actorly flesh as the ducking and diving producers could charm the BBFC scrutinisers into permitting.

Jon Pertwee urges us to splink

The album sets out its sonic stall in the opening moments of the brief prelude, Make Way. A Carl Orff-like percussive tinkling is juxtaposed with manic mechanical ricochets sounding like field recordings made in a Japanese pachinko parlour or an aging chorus of excitable cash registers. This is overlaid by the sound of children making a racket in the resonant space of a swimming pool. The later gives off the chlorinated whiff of the public information film, another common Ghost Box reference point. A ‘learn to swim’ film of this type was explicitly evoked in The Advisory Circle track In The Swim from their Mind How You Go LP. The second track, Elektrik Karousel, gets the game moving with a rolling jazz drum pattern in the Take Five style, which is phased and spun around. The carousel is definitely turning, and taking its slightly woozy effect. Harpsichord arpeggios and patterns are layered on top, as are snatches of immaculately RP-articulated dialogue which sound as if they are being tuned in from half-remembered children’s programmes. Then there is the Pavlovian jangle of ice cream van chimes.

The harpsichord is a signature sound throughout, its sprightly, lightly plucked notes non-resonant and so following each other in rapid succession before awkward silences can descend. It’s an instrument which somehow became prominent in the 1960s and summons up the contradictory impulses of that wild decade. It’s both antique and kinetically of the moment, expressing a bustling English eccentricity which at the time was both looking to the future whilst trying to maintain well-worn traditions. It could be used as the soundtrack to a betweeded Margaret Rutherford blithely riding her bicycle through an unchanged country village or to a mod-styled Mrs Peel speeding away from her London mews flat in a fast white sports car. And with a little echo and reverb, it neatly conjures the unthreatening approach of friendly spooks. Other sounds which recur and give the album its particular flavour and sense of continuity with previous Focus Group records include xylophones, musique concrete blips and skrees, chanted, ritualistic vocals and pastoral flute (whether in folk, Kes-jazz or impressionistic Debussyish mood). On this record there are also elements of free jazz sax (on The Magic Pendulum), Indian classical music (sitar, bansuri flute and tabla on Flaming Voices) and even the surprising intervention of swooshing Jeff Beck-like jazz fusion guitar sounds on The Plastic Castle, perhaps suggesting the thrill of rushing down a plastic slide descending in a spiralling curve from the crenellations. Sounds recur and recombine at various junctures throughout like themes being reiterated, varied and placed in different settings. Indeed, the whole album, whose tracks are generally very short, feels like an extended suite (with Flaming Voices as a mini-suite within). This is given further credence by the lack of track divisions on the vinyl LP. The recurrence of particular sounds or harmonic sequences (there’s a series of soft guitar chords which seems to emerge at periodic intervals) also brings us back to the Karousel game, with its own cycles and loops, dictated by the chance operations of that spinning dial, sending players back to previously occupied squares.


Julian House may be the secret mastermind behind The Focus Group, but here he gives credit for ‘help from Broadcast’. There is a sense, then, that the collaboration begun on the Witch Cults from the Radio Age LP is being continued in some shape or form. House is now in a post-Broadcast trio with James Cargill and Roj Stevens, both ex-members of the group. They will be recording and hopefully performing under the name Children of Alice. Both James and Roj have recorded for Ghost Box before, and it is they who contribute to this album under the proud Broadcast banner. Something of their characteristic sounds can perhaps be detected at various points. James’ warm analogue synth lines seem to lend a magic hour glow to Flaming Voices, Let’s Listen, SPOLK and Petroleum Paisley, whilst the trundling and clanking sound of complex mechanisms in motion which was a feature of Roj’s The Transactional Dharma of Roj LP forms the unstable Meccano framework to parts of Bachoo, Flaming Voices, Frumious Numinous and Harmonium. To offer a Radiophonic Workshop analogy, which seems appropriate in the context, Roj is like John Baker, using the electronic manipulation of sounds found or synthesised to produce elastic, springy rhythms. James, meanwhile, has a Paddy Kingsland ear for melody and a Delian sense of rich atmospherics. These elements combine perfectly in Flaming Voices, which maybe affords us a glimpse in to what the Children of Alice might sound like.

That name pays tribute to the late Trish Keenan, the voice (and much more) of Broadcast, who had an abiding love of Lewis Carroll’s labyrinthine dream tales. She is given thanks for the ‘sounds you sent’. And is that an echo of her song in the angelic choral voices drifting in the nebulous background of Frumious Numinous. The title makes reference to the nonsense ballad (which yet makes instant sense) Jabberwocky from Alice Through the Looking Glass (‘Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the Frumious Bandersnatch!’, you’ll recall). You can hear a recording of Trish reading it on the Broadcast website. It’s a suggestive title, with hints of the transcendental, a numinosity which often illuminated her lyrics. It hints at some spirit living on, perhaps just in the molecular patterns of oxide tape or in the lines of digital light etched into the polycarbonate spiral of a CD. But hopefully in some more expansive form.

House’s technique in the studio (or sat in front of his laptop) mirrors his graphic style in its deliberate creation of a rough-edged, imperfect finish. Where his visual collages preserve or cultivate torn borders and hastily scissored outlines, the aural collages of The Focus Group delight in seemingly abrupt and clumsy edits (the equivalent of cinematic jump cuts), and loops whose ‘joins’ can be clearly heard. The hiss of scratched vinyl can be detected at certain intervals, too. The nature of the materials used to make the sounds is left raw and exposed, just as much as it was in the brutalist concrete architecture of the 60s and 70s, and with a similar aesthetic and perhaps even ideological intent. It seems to amount to a pronounced disavowal of the polish and surface sheen of airbrushed perfection offered (and it’s an offer that is generally accepted) by the effortless tools of digital manipulation. The process is apparently made evident, although this is of course an imaginary process. There are no tape loops or spliced edits, no whirring spools or glowing dials. The rough cut and paste juxtapositions are a conscious aesthetic choice, creating the appearance of something which has been put together in a more laborious and solidly mechanistic way. The illusion of materiality adds to the archetypal Ghost Box concern with the utopian dreaming (and propagandistic scheming) of the post-war British world (Macmillan to Callaghan, roughly speaking). Some of the tracks look to the more avant-garde, lab-coated tendencies of music in this period. A radio being tuned at the start of Hypnoradiol, which thereby incorporates the static sounds of the universe between stations into the piece, which is followed by pointillist punctuations and vocal distortions, points to John Cage and early electronic experiments. The electronic stridulations on The Heavy Blessing sound like the artificial chirruping and metallic frog chorusing on Pauline Oliveros’ 1967 tape piece, gloriously titled Alien Bog.

Johnny plays jazz - Staccato meets...

A processed flute in tigt gruffil (anagram or meaningful nonsense?) could be transposed from an early Tangerine Dream record. Flaming Voices has a wafting breeze of Debussyesque flute, which morphs quite naturally into its Indian equivalent (Debussy was influenced by Eastern music, after all). The Indian music adds a new colour to the Focus Group palette. It is blended with a Stravinskyish oboe in a marriage which seems a lot more relaxed than the rather stiff East meets West meetings between Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin. Most striking and unexpected is Hope Hodgsone, which sounds like a straight piece of reflective after hours jazz. There’s even a touch of night club chatter and clinking glasses to give it that authentic Village Vanguard aura. It’s a spare piece with soft brush on snare and cymbal, a minimal bass suspension and impressionistic Bill Evans chords. Has it been edited together from different sources in the prescribed xenochronous Zappa manner. If so, it’s skilfully done (and in this instance, you can’t hear the join). Or perhaps this is the surprise new direction for the Children of Alice – a piano jazz trio. The title posits (in my mind, at least) the appealing notion of a character who is a combination of William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective Carnacki and John Cassavetes’ jazz piano playing PI Johnny Staccato, smoky New York dives colliding with Edwardian drawing rooms.

...Carnacki - chasing after hours spectres

The final named track, More Night Films, has a touch of the spiralling Terry Riley all night flight organ plus delay improvisations bubbling away in the background, beneath more plucked, slightly melancholic harpsichord figures. Riley did record the soundtrack for a couple of films in the early 70s – Les Yeux Fermés and Lifespan. Perhaps there’s a hint of those here; Late night art screenings for an audience nodding off on scattered beanbags. Such longform, flowing improvisations are the exact opposite of the Focus Group’s concentrated cut-out vignettes. Riley isn’t allowed to float off into a prolonged nocturnal trance here, though. The Night Movies end and we are left in an echoing auditorium for a brief untitled coda. A queasy Blackpool organ plays a desultory chord over and over, only serving to emphasise the emptiness of the space. The ratcheting clatter of the opening is now the emptying of the tills and the bustle of cleaners, who are also eager to finish up and get home as quickly as possible. We are being ushered out – the show’s over. But it can start again whenever we want, the karousel set once more into slow rotation, speeding up into a disorienting, dazzling and ever changing blur of motion. Just go back to square one (Make Way), spin the dial and begin the game all over again.

The Focus Group Broadcast

Faint stirrings from the Broadcast camp as an American tour and a forthcoming EP are announced as follows (on the Warp records website):

Broadcast are set to return to American shores this fall - with a series of shows teaming up with Atlas Sound (Kranky/4AD). Both groups have new material surfacing this year - an EP from Broadcast, to be released around the tour, and a new Atlas Sound album 'Logos' in October.
"Okay people...Broadcast and The Focus Group have joined hands to create a new ep of seancing songs and witch cult rumbles" (says singer Trish Keenan).

I saw them performing with Atlas Sound at the Explosions in the Sky All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Minehead a couple of years ago, although perhaps ‘saw’ is an inapt description. Coming in some minutes into Atlas Sound’s performance performance, the lofty figure of Bradford Cox could easily be seen above the heads of the audience. But what were these other intriguing analogue whooshes and oscillations which surrounded his effects haloed guitar sound. Fancy pedals of some stripe, I figured, and was surprised when he also seemed to be playing against a manipulated sample of Trish Keenan singing Black Cat. Then, at the end of a thoroughly enjoyable set, he announced ‘ladies and gentlemen, Broadcast, and Trish and James stood up from where they had been toying with their arcane circuitry, entirely hidden from the view of all but the first row. I like to think that this electronic bric-a-brac is usually housed in some customised garden shed to which they retire when inspiration strikes, and that neighbours hear strange sounds drifting over the fence and mutter ‘they’re at it again’. But I suspect this is just idle fancy. Evidently a friendship was formed, anyway, an Atlas axis established. You can probably still find an audio-visual record of ‘tea with Broadcast’ on the Deerhunter/Atlas Sound website and blog.

The collaboration with the Focus Group is very exciting, a meeting with the world of Ghost Box which has long been anticipated given their shared enthusiasms and tastes (and the fact that they know each other, of course). A hint of what happens when these worlds collide can be found by listening and watching to the improvised soundtrack to the Focus Group’s Julian House’s eerie film which was screened at the Belbury Poly Youthclub night at the Shunt Vaults in London a few months back (see previous post). Sounds to evoke the chill atmospheres of Arthur Machen or Blackwood’s supernatural tales, and a fine way to welcome the oncoming of darker Autumn evenings.