Friday, June 12, 2015

OTHER CHANNELS AND SEANCE AT HOBS LANE VINYL RE-ISSUES

Two classic Ghost Box albums are re-issued for the first time on vinyl today. Both remastered especially for this format - heavyweight 180g vinyl packaged in luxurious redesigned artwork by Julian House, with original liner notes on beautiful colour inner sleeves.

Other Channels was the first full length album from The Advisory Circle. It evokes a world of public information films, domestic isolation, tranquilliser addiction and the ever present nuclear threat. Jon Brooks achieves this with a carefully crafted sound palette of analogue synthesisers and fragments of long lost broadcasts.

Light synthesiser melodies and moments of surreal humour float in a drift of pastoral melancholia and fuzzy music concrete as the album’s protagonist stares out forlornly at the modernist public library outlined against the ancient bulk of Belbury hill.

Beautifully evocative liner notes by writer, broadcaster and journalist Ken Hollings set the music in a context of domestic neuroses and cold war paranoia.


Séance at Hobs Lane by Mount Vernon Arts Lab is a classic of psychogeographical electronics. Hobs Lane is the fictional tube station where the action of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit takes place. The album plunges the listener into a world of abandoned underground stations, eighteenth century secret societies and the footsore reveries of generations of flâneurs from Thomas De Quincey to Iain Sinclair.

The album was conceived and recorded by Drew Mulholland in 2001, and collaborators included Adrian Utley (Portishead), Jhon Balance (Coil), Isobel Campbell (Belle & Sebastian), Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub) and Barry 7 (Add N to X). Sleeve notes by the novelist Lawrence Norfolk.



Both are available now in the Ghost Box shop on vinyl and download. They'll also be at your usual stockists very soon. Vinyl customers in the Ghost Box shop will also qualify for a free download version of these albums.

(NOTE: this only applies to Ghost Box shoppers - no DL code is included with the LP anywhere else)