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)

OTHER VOICES 05 OUT TODAY

Pye Corner Audio (with Belbury Poly)
Out on now and available here on super heavyweight 7" vinyl or download.

FOLKLORE TAPES & TOITOITOI VISIT THE GUEST SHOP

There are two new beautifully hand crafted items in the Ghost Box Guest shop this week. First is the delightful little cassette compilation box set from Folklore Tapes called Merry May.

This includes:

-pink cassette housed inside an embossed box

-20 page research booklet that includes an essay on May Day and artwork by David Chatton Barker

-a cutting of a May pole ribbon

-download card redeemable from the label

A dual format compilation featuring a rare appearance from James Cargill, Julian House & Roj's Children Of Alice project (Broadcast and The Focus Group), Liverpool psyche heads Carl Turney & Brian Campbell, label owners David Orphan and Ian Humberstone as well as long time associates Sam Mcloughlin, Rob St John and more.



Folklore Tapes say this,

"The artists contributing to this compilation have each researched a particular May ritual and, informed by their findings, conjured a piece in response. As such, the cassette takes its listeners on an audiological journey where, mounted upon clacking Hobby horses, they will meet with May Birchers and Dewers, reel around Maypoles and parade the streets in the company of the Earl of Rone and the Fool.

Folklore Tapes is an ongoing project in which the arcane traditions, stories and phenomena of the British Isles are creatively re-imagined by contemporary artists. This may take the form of soundtrack, film or installation, but is always centred upon a particular theme or location. The project has received widespread acclaim since its conception in 2011 and enjoys close ties with Cecil Sharp House, the British Library and Caught By The River. Andy Votel and members of Clinic and Broadcast are counted among its many contributors." 

And a perfect complement to this is Hollow Earth Hippies by ToiToiToi, the work of Sebastian Counts, an electronic musician based in Berlin.

His sound is bound to appeal to fans of Ghost Box, being a timeless melange of ethnography, TV music and psychonautical exploration all rendered by analogue electronics, tape and samples. Its weird, witty and engrossing.  ToiToiToi will be releasing a single on Ghost Box for the Other Voices series later this year, but meanwhile we'd urge you to delve into this beautifully packaged, self released debut.

Hollow Earth Hippies is a 15track CD-r with beautiful handmade cover and booklet. There's very few left of what is destined to be a collectors item.

"Its a little insight to a place where the positive social aspects of 70's politics seem to have survived. This music is the soundtrack to a world where ecology, economy, nature and technology, spirituality and rationalism are not in contradiction at all." says ToiToiToi



Both are available here in very limited quantity right now.

(By the way "Toi toi toi" as German speakers and opera fans will know, is a traditional wish of good luck , equivalent to "break a leg", and pronounced "toy  toy  toy")