isolation mix

Moon Wiring Club with a hunkered-in-the-bunker mix that starts with bouncy electrokitsch and heads into a blend of  early UKtekno, twisty-turny Nineties IDM, and unusual breakbeat hardcore choices. Excellent selection, expertly threaded. 

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Christmas Bumper Issue

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!

Moon Wiring Club cometh with his customary seasonal offering: Cavity Slabs. Like the atypical summertime long-player Ghastly Garden Centres of earlier this year, Slabs is a brisk and beat-driven effort, veering away from the boggy hinterland of ambience and vocal gloop into which much of Ian Hodgson's output this past decade has sunk so deliriously. Focused and concise, the new record  boasts just eight tuff tunes. The reference point this time around is breakbeat hardcore - in moments, I'm reminded of the phat-but-spooky sound of Eon, although Ian says the launchpad for the new direction was actually this obscure tune:



This very very early Moving Shadow track (by a group later and slightly better known for their Rising High releases) first reached Ian's eardrums via an Autechre radio show from many years ago. "It always stuck with me. It’s that mix of beats with ‘anything goes’ sampling and environmental sounds ~ it always makes me think of coastlines... and a sort of grey mistiness."

                                  

The aim with Cavity Slabs was to take a detour round the ongoing overload of rave-replicas, with their neurotic attention to period detail and naked nostalgia, and instead reactivate the bygone playfulness and incongruous-samples-clumsily-collaged approach of the early Nineties, which threw up so many genre-of-one anomalies and half-realised oddments alongside the classic bangers and slammers.
                                     
           

^^^a megamix of three tunes from the album^^^

"I wanted to compose something that reflected the dankness / mystery of fog without it being an ambient drone affair," adds Ian. The name Cavity Slabs comes from a pile of building materials Ian passed on a rainy-day stroll, which conjured associations both of vinyl platters and "limestone moorside and burial chambers". The overall atmosphere and thematic is caught in the slogan "COAX ANCIENT VOICES FROM THE LANDSCAPE" and track titles like "Cromlech Technology" - cromlech being a megalithic altar-tomb or circle of standing stones around a burial mound.



Cavity Slabs is available for purchase here .

But wait... there's more... adding to the Xmas feast, there's a new, radically different version of an old MWC fave: a DL-only VULPINE REDUX edition of Somewhere A Fox Is Getting Married.  "The original album plus 47 minutes of 12 bonus track alternate takes / extended versions / tangentially related nonsense from the vaults circa 2006-2011" including unreleased experiments like "35 Year Sit Down" and the lost "Schlagerdelia" classic "Mountain Men".




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Talking of "grey mistiness" -  remiss have I been in not alerting parishioners to this new release by  Lo Five - Wirral-based electronician Neil Grant.



There's a really nice "mundane mystical" atmosphere to the sound Neil's worked up on Geography of the Abyss - muzzy textures like looking out through a coach window that's streaked with rippling rivulets of heavy rain, or trying to peer through the frosted-glass window of your front door to see who's coming up the path. The vibe of the album reminds me of the sort of trance you can fall into while travelling on a train or a bus, that feeling of slipping outside the moorings of time.


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A record that not only remissly passed without comment from me, but that I missed completely when it originally came out in June - Vanishing Twin's The Age of Immunology.




Triffic stuff -  at times like The Focus Group if based around "proper" musicianship rather than sampladelia. As with their previous album Choose Your Own Adventure, the starting points of Broadcast, Stereolab, White Noise, library music, etc, are still discernible, but now they are definitively on a journey of their own.

‘You Are Not an Island’, ‘Invisible World’ and ‘Planete Sauvage’ were apparently "recorded in nighttime sessions in an abandoned mill in Sudbury"!




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More remissness - alert overdue for the release of the audio element of Andrew Pekler's wonderful Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas  project of last year.



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A recommendation from parish elder Bruce Levenstein



Release rationale:

Mount Maxwell continues his run of 1970s themed releases with a full length meditation on the perceptual experiences of children born in the wake of the 1960's cultural revolution. Highly ambivalent in tone, Only Children marks a departure from earlier MM releases both in its use of acoustic instruments and in a newfound sense of criticality towards its subject matter; the back-to-the-land optimism of tracks like 'Nature ID' in uneasy proximity to the skeptical disquiet of 'Weird Places' and 'Nomad'. 

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Bruce also brings to my attention this effort



Release rationale:

There was a certain something about watching television in the 70s and 80s. The static crackle when you switched on your set. The faint smell of ozone as it slowly warmed up. The chunky buttons (including such flights of fancy as 'BBC3' and 'ITV2"). And, of course, the programmes themselves.

Whether it was HTV's seminal Folk Horror tinged children's classics 'Sky' or Children of the Stones, BBC1's fiercely intelligent 'adult-show-for-kids' 'The Changes' or ITV's everyday tale of alien possession, 'Chocky', the era was bursting with inventive, unforgettable and yes, terrifying shows.

The only thing more memorable than the actual programmes were their theme tunes. The unique talents of Paddy Kingsland, Sidney Saget, Eric Wetherell, John Hyde and many more were responsible for the atmospheric, eerie soundscapes which formed the aural backdrop to our favourite shows. Which is where Kev Oyston (The Soulless Party) and Colin Morrison (Castles in Space) come in. They've corralled the best of today's innovative electronic musicians, and together they've created 'Scarred For Life: The Album', a collection of new music inspired by the terrifying televisual sounds of our childhoods.

All proceeds for this album will go to aid Cancer Research UK, a charity which is close to the hearts of some of our artists, one of whom is currently undergoing treatment for cancer.

Enjoy. And remember: DO have nightmares. They're good for you.

-Stephen Brotherstone & Dave Laurence, co-authors 'Scarred For Life Volume One: the 1970's'. .

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The incredibly prolific and thorough Stephen Prince of A Year in the Country - independent scholar of the rustic eerie and convenor of reliably interesting compilations - has just published a second book.



Straying From the Pathways: Hidden Histories, Echoes of the Future's Past and the Unsettled Landscape is the companion volume to last year's Wandering Through Spectral Fields: Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology. 

How does Stephen do it?!?

More information about Straying From the Pathways here.

Hark at this here Table of Contents!

1. Explorations of an Eerie Landscape: Texte und Töne – The Disruption, The Changes, The Edge is Where the Centre is: David Rudkin and Penda’s Fen: An Archaeology, The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, The Stink Still Here – the miners’ strike 1984-85 – Robert Macfarlane – Benjamin Myers’ Under the Rock: The Poetry of a Place

2. Fractured Dream Transmissions and a Collapsing into Ghosts: John Carpenter – Prince of Darkness, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Village of the Damned, Christine – Nigel Kneale – Martin Quatermass – John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos

3. Hinterland Tales of Hidden Histories and Unobserved Edgeland Transgressions: Adrian McKinty’s In the Morning I’ll Be Gone – Clare Carson’s Orkney Twilight – David Peace’s GB84 – Tony White’s The Fountain in the Forest

4. Countercultural Archives and Experiments in Temporary Autonomous Zones: Jeremy Sandford and Ron Reid’s Tomorrow’s People – Richard Barnes’ The Sun in the East: Norfolk & Suffolk Fairs – Sam Knee’s Memory of a Free Festival: The Golden Era of the British Underground Festival Scene – Gavin Watson’s Raving ’89 – Molly Macindoe’s Out of Order: The Underground Rave Scene 1997-2006

5. The Village and Seaside Idyll Gone Rogue: Hot Fuzz – The Avengers’ “Murdersville” – The Prisoner – In My Mind – Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth Mon Amour

6. Albion in the Overgrowth and Timeslip Echoes: Requiem – The Living and the Dead – Britannia – Detectorists

7. In Cars – Building a Better Future, Peculiarly Subversive Enchantments and Faded Futuristic Glamour: In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway – Joe
 Moran’s On Roads: A Hidden History – Chris Petit’s Radio On – Autophoto – Martin Parr’s Abandoned Morris Minors of the West of Ireland – The Friends of Eddie Coyle – Killing Them Softly – Langdon Clay’s Cars: New York City 1974-76

8. Brutalism, Reaching for the Sky and Bugs in Utopia: Peter Chadwick’s This Brutal World – Bladerunner – J.G.Ballard – Ben Wheatley – High-Rise – Peter Mitchell’s Memento Mori – Brick High-Rise

9. Battles with the Old Guard and the Continuing sparking of Vivid Undercurrents: A Very Peculiar Practice – Edge of Darkness

10. Lycanthropes, Dark Fairy Tales and the Dangers of Wandering off the Path: The Company of Wolves – Danielle Dax – Red Riding Hood – Wolfen – Hansel & Gretel: Witchhunters – The Keep

11. The Empty City Film and Other Visions of the End of Days – Survival and Shopping in the Post-Apocalypse: Day of the Triffids – Into the Forest – Night of the Comet –The Quiet Earth

12. Universe Creation, Spectral Lines in the Cultural Landscape and Reimagined Echoes from the Past: Hauntology – Hypnagogic Pop – Synthwave – D.A.L.I.’s When Haro Met Sally – Nocturne’s Dark Seed – Beyond the Black Rainbow – Mo’ Wax, UNKLE, Tricky, Massive Attack, Portishead, DJ Shadow, Andrea Parker – Ghost Box Records,  The Focus Group, Belbury Poly – The Memory Band – The Delaware Road – Rowan : Morrison – Howlround – Mark Fisher – the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – Adrian Younge’s Electronique Void – DJ Food – Grey Frequency – Keith Seatman – Douglas Powell – Akiha Den Den – The Ghost in the MP3 – Black Channels – The Quietened Village – The Corn Mother

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Now this is a little odd - not only is this here chap trespassing on Hatherley's terrain, he's borrowed his first name too! 




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Finally -  and no doubt this morsel of news has already reached your flabbergasted ears  -  but cor blimey guvnor,  Paul Weller's only going to release a record on Ghost Box! The In Another Room EP is out early next year. And it's actually rather good.

EVP MVP mix by MWC

A tasty and unusual mix from Moon Wiring Club



The flavour here is "mainly 90s off-kilter instrumental hip-hop and electronica tracks" featuring the likes of Tek 9 and Luke Vibert, and generally echoing Ian Hodgson's formative love of illbient, Wordsound and Skam. MWC in head-nod, boom-bap mode - loping, lurching, swampy, spacey, texture-dolloped and droopy-lidded. 

But draped also with lots and lots of the vintage telly-derived voice-snippets that you expect and love from MWC.

Hauntology Parish Newsletter spring 2019 - Moon Wiring Club, Baron Mordant,The Caretaker

In the new edition of The Wire, I have an extended essay-review about the career-closing releases from The Caretaker and Mordant Music: the sixth and final installment of James Kirby's gargantuan Everywhere at the end of Time project, which started three years ago, and Baron Mordant's last blast, Mark of the Mould. The latter is an unmissable emission - like eMMplekz if the Baron handled the backing tracks as well as the verbals... the latter proving once again that Ian Hicks is simultaneously the Robert Macfarlane of built-up Britain and the Chris Morris of BoomkatKultur.



Also ruffling the parish this month - and making this newsletter a tale of two Ians - is the announcement of an unexpected, non-wintertime release from Moon Wiring Club aka Ian Hodgson. 






Ghastly Garden Centres is a timely swerve from the ambient-amorphous direction of recent MWC releases and a jaunty step into brisk concision. In fact, the guiding concept here is that every track is a single - making the assemblage perhaps a Now! style compilation of hits, or a chart countdown. It's MWC - so it's still creepy and manky - but it's also catchy and bouncy.

As for the ghostly-ghastly gardening theme - well, apparently this is a real thing, a subject of internet obsession: abandoned, overgrown plant nurseries and derelict garden centres.



Further raising the pulse of parishioners is the parallel release of Catmask, a collection -  styled as issue no. 1 of a glossy magazine - of Ian Hodgson's artwork: some already released, on the records or at the Blank Workshop website, but much unfamiliar and never seen. There are images from Ian's abandoned children's book project, for instance, which if I recall correctly, was the acorn from which grew the mighty oak of Clinkskell and the 21 - or 23, depending on how you count -  releases to date, including collaborations and side projects.


                                                   


Catmask is a gorgeous slinky looking and feeling object to peruse and fondle. It completes the sense of Moon Wiring Club as a project of.... I won't say, world-building, as that's a cliche now... but place-making, maybe.


                                                    

UK customers can buy Ghastly Garden Centres and Catmask here 

European customers can buy Ghastly Garden Centres and Catmask here 

Rest of world customers can buy Ghastly Garden Centres and Catmask here 

big up all haunty cru

A festive mix from the Man like Ian Hodgson, reminding me I've been remiss in not proclaiming the existence of a new Moon Wiring Club album, Psychedelic Spirit Show, which arrived at its customary time of year a few weeks ago and is ruddy excellent.



PSS ventures further down the marshy path towards total entropy - sunken grooves, gappy beats, wilting tones, voices like flickery lantern-lit faces receding into foggy formlessness.

Even though PSS doesn't sound anything like it, the origins of the album lie in a just-for-fun exercise in making "drum & bass / jungle / raveish / whathaveyou tunes", Ian informs. The resulting 25 or so tracks  - never intended for release, designed merely as a "meditational vibe / head-space cleaner process" - then became the mulch out of which grew a completely other project.  Approaching the source material as if doing a mix, Ian took bits from one track and put them together with bits from different tracks. "I split each track into 3 sections ~ rhythm / melody / effects (voice samples and that) then applied numerous knackering techniques and filters, and began to construct whole new shonky-hybrid tunes overlaying a melody from one track with the rhythm of another.  I called this process (wait for it) ‘unconscious compositioning’ -  a way to distance myself from the predictable choices that you inevitably make when composing music for a number of years, and then being able to surprise myself with choices I wouldn’t wholly ever have made."

Less loftily, Ian also described the manky making of the album as "a bit like getting the dust out of an antique carpet with one of those wicker tennis racquet carpet beaters".

In an analogy that really couldn't be further up my alley,  Ian further describes the final sequenced album as reminding him of  "a car tape I had in the 90s. On one side was Grooverider The Prototype Years and on the other a selection of 60s/70s light entertainment tunes. If you imagine that tape festering in a glove compartment for 20 years until both sides play together simultaneously at the wrong speed..."

The Dream Perception Machine mix is also splendid seasonal stuff with a loose "Psychedelic Telly" thematic. In an apt time-twisty metaphor, Ian describes the contents as "retroactive inspirations" - the kind of stuff that could have informed the making of the album, except they didn't.

Psychedelic Spirit Show, incidentally, is a vinyl-only release, purchasable here (UK), here (Europe), or here (rest of world). 

But - breaking with customary seasonal release rhythms - there looks likely to be a Moon Wiring Club compact disc in the spring. 

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - June 2018 : Moon Wiring Club stuff 'n' nonsense; Bloxham Tapes; new A Year in the Country themed album The Shildam Hall Tapes; Andrew Pekler's Phantom Islands

Celebrating the Summer Solstice tomorrow, here's a new Moon Wiring Club mix! 

Mr. Hodgson describes it as starting out as your "pretty standard hyper-soup of the usual 70s/80s audio synth nonsense with added vocal bitsy" that then veers into an unexpected "Industrial dance selection... everyone needs to have heard Soma Holiday at least once."

Mr. Hodgson also points out some related MWC action:

-  new MWC back catalogue now available for the first time at Bandcamp

- a MWC interview that features in new "folk horror" book  Harvest Hymns. Volume II - Sweet Fruits

-  MWC track contributed to "3rd Wave" hauntology compilation, Present At The Terminal, on the  Modern Aviation label

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Mr. Hodgson mentions in passing a new 3rd Wave hauntology entity possibly worth checking out -  Bloxham Tapes.  

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A Year In the Country have a new themed album involving multiple contributors out next month, The Shildam Hall Tapes, which sounds excellently eerie on a first listen. 

Release rationale: 

 “Reflections on an imaginary film.” 

In the late 1960s a film crew began work on a well-funded feature film in a country mansion, having been granted permission by the young heir of the estate. 

Amidst rumours of aristocratic decadence, psychedelic use and even possibly dabbling in the occult, the film production collapsed, although it is said that a rough cut of it and the accompanying soundtrack were completed but they are thought to have been filed away and lost amongst storage vaults. 

Few of the cast or crew have spoken about events since and any reports from then seem to contradict one another and vary wildly in terms of what actually happened on the set. 

A large number of those involved, including a number of industry figures who at the time were considered to have bright futures, simply seemed to disappear or step aside from the film industry following the film's collapse, their careers seemingly derailed or cast adrift by their experiences. 

Little is known of the film's plot but several unedited sections of the film and its soundtrack have surfaced, found amongst old film stock sold as a job lot at auction - although how they came to be there is unknown. 

The fragments of footage and audio that have appeared seem to show a film which was attempting to interweave and reflect the heady cultural mix of the times; of experiments and explorations in new ways of living, a burgeoning counter culture, a growing interest in and reinterpretation of folk culture and music, early electronic music experimentation, high fashion, psychedelia and the crossing over of the worlds of the aristocracy with pop/counter culture and elements of the underworld. 

The Shildam Hall Tapes takes those fragments as its starting point and imagines what the completed soundtrack may have sounded like; creating a soundtrack for a film that never was. 

My memory is getting foggier as the years advance, but I think - I think - that I forgot to flag up this recent A Year in the Country release from just last month, Audio Albion

release rationale: 

Audio Albion is a music and field recording map of Britain, which focuses on rural and edgeland areas. 

Each track contains field recordings from locations throughout the land and is accompanied by notes on the recordings by the contributors. 

The tracks record the sounds found and heard when wandering down pathways, over fields, through marshes, alongside rivers, down into caves and caverns, climbing hills, along coastlands, through remote mountain forestland, amongst the signs of industry and infrastructure and its discarded debris. 

Intertwined with the literal recording of locations, the album explores the history, myths and beliefs of the places, their atmospheres and undercurrents, personal and cultural connections - the layered stories that lie amongst, alongside and beneath the earth, plants and wildlife. 

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News from the parish's twinned town in West Germany - Andrew Pekler invents a new genre - hauntonautology - with the announcement of  Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas  - "an interactive online map that charts the sounds and histories of islands that were once found on nautical maps but have since disappeared." Part of the larger Fourth Worlds online project /  real-world exhibition + conference for "l'ethnographie imaginaire dans l'experimentation musicale et sonore". 

Release rationale: 

"Phantom Islands are artifacts of the age of maritime discovery and colonial expansion. During centuries of ocean exploration these islands were sighted, charted, described and even landed on – but their existence was never ultimately verified. Poised between cartographic fact and maritime fiction, they haunted seafarers’ maps for hundreds of years, providing inspiration for legend, fantasy, and counterfactual histories. Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas interprets these imaginations in the form of a map of speculative sounds from 27 phantom islands around the world.

"Explore the map by clicking on the names of phantom islands to learn the histories of their discoveries and the dates of their cartographical existence. Zoom in on individual islands to hear their musical, biophonic and geophonic soundscapes. Or, engage Cruise mode to be taken on an audio tour of all the Phantom Islands – ideal for passive listening in a separate browser window or tab. (In this mode, all the sounds, played in sequence, amount to something like my new album.) Recommended browsers: Chrome (version 67+), Firefox (version 60+ ), Safari (version 11+). Not usable on mobile devices. 

"Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas was commissioned by Jeu de Paume for the exhibition Fourth Worlds: Imaginary Ethnography in Music and Sound and was produced with the support of DICRéAM, CNC. "

ROUTLEDGE DEXTER SATELLITE SYSTEMS MIX = a brand-new audio assemblage from Mr Moon Wiring Club...  months in the gestation, it's rather different from his usual mixology .. more overloaded and choppy...  Horse's mouth indicates the original intent ("started off as very much a ‘murky hip-hop’ mix") and the different outcome ("grew organically into something else... picture the whole thing like a malfunctioning satellite broadcast, different channels spluttering spasmodically then fizzing out") while also revealing that the constituent elements include the hhactor Edward Woodward, Zoviet France + Evan Parker, and a surprising amount of contemporary music (Actress, Ikonika, Best  Available Technology). 

Official mix manifesto:  

"Greetings Citizen Volunteers! CLASP your swanky bakelite listening devices and tune into the ROUTLEDGE DEXTER SATELLITE SYSTEMS MIX ~ unquestionably the finest in MWC deftly-spliced disjointed hip-hop wonky radio-play melodic oddness around! Freshly Near Mint / almost unplayable antique sonic-slices are politely cajoled-up inside a labyrinthine audio-mesh extracted from video archive endurance excursion-sagas of perplexingly perpetual proportions! But don't get greedy Stu ~ an abundance of rhythmic propulsion & uncanny momentum is never far from t'derangement table. Endeavour to enjoy!"

tantalising news

Often when a recording artist reaches that point where it feels fitting to release a 

best-of / greatest-hits -  or a career-spanning commemorative archival anthology -  it seems to signal  (or even, in some obscure fashion, precipitate) the end of their musical journey. A silence ensues. Perhaps followed, after a long interval, by a wan comeback. Perhaps followed by nothing at all. 

In Mr. Hodgson's case, he has not only returned punctually, at his usual time of year, but he has come back stronger than ever, with a triple-dollop of some of Moon Wiring Club's best work yet: the double-CD Tantalising Mews and the vinyl long-player Cateared Chocolatiers.
                                   
                                       


                                                                              

Noteworthy is the attractive new-look packaging for Tantalising Mews: a cardboard gatefold, with no information on the front, back or inside (indeed the release only identifies itself on the spine).

                                       


In a pouch lurks a fold-out insert that supplies the titles of the thirty-three  - thirty-three! - tracks on the pair of discs, and hints at the narrative framework that links them: "wireless telegraphy - from the immaculate ghost of an identical ancestor".  Perhaps informed here by the analogy that 19th Century spiritualists saw between remote communication with the dead and the recently invented telegraph?


                                      

Cateared Chocolatiers contains - in the form of a brightly coloured fold-out poster -  the board to a game that involves "a journey through a rococo town of rolled-up carpets and crumbling toffee buildings in order to catch a train from a weird rural station you know you’re going to miss." The boardgame can be played by following the rules printed on one side of the disc's intricately illustrated dust jacket and by consulting the cast of characters arrayed and described on the other side.

                                      

Noteworthy also: the sounds.  "Ghostly drifting molten landscape musicke" is how Blank Workshop characterise the contents of Chocolatiers.  And indeed that album especially, but all three of the discs,  push the ambient-leaning tendencies in previous Moon Wiring Club music to a new extreme of ectoplasmic exquisiteness and sickly malaise.  Beats, barely mustering the will to manifest, are decrepit and ineffectual entitities, rarely cohering into a pulse, let alone a groove. Voices droop and decompose, releasing vapours that fog the brain and obnubilate concentration. The mind wanders into mist-shrouded, boggy terrain...  mistakes marshy phosphors for beacons... gets lost... founders...

A true return to formlessness.

You can place advance orders for this Christmas hamper bulging with sticky delight here and here.

                                                        

knacked-up

Like mince pies, ginger wine, brazil nuts and packets of dates, the Moon Wiring Club album is a seasonal occurrence. The crepuscular dank of Ian Hodgson's latest is always linked for me with that time of year when daylight hours shrivel and the chill creeps under your clothes into your bones.  

                                      

A Fondness For Fancy Hats is the latest emanation from the Blank Workshop. There are two formats, compact disc and cassette, with the latter bearing an extra title: Soft Confusion.  In line with the governing audio-concept of "Edwardian Computer Games", the cassettes nestle inside the sort of plastic case that once upon a time housed certain videogames ("mainly BBC Micro ones", notes Ian, causing me to nod blankly, having not the slightest inkling whereof he speaks).  

The Soft Confusion version especially -  which involved recording much of the CD onto tape, mucking about with it, looping, weaving in game sounds and ghost-flickers of earlier MWC tunes,  until the end-product resembles a "knacked-up" mixtape - is one of the best things he's done yet, I think.  Hear an excerpt:

At this point MWC possesses the most consistently on-it discography (and Fancy Hats is album #9, would you believe!) in the H-ological domain, nipping clear ahead of Ghost Box, Jon Brooks, Mordant, James Kirby, et al, who all have more stumbles to their name. (Only the Royal Wedding-timed Somewhere A Fox Is Getting Married failed to fully engage me, and perhaps revealingly, that one didn't come out in the winter). 

More information about A Fondness for Fancy Hats / Soft Confusion and the "mind palace" is secreted here. A vintage piece on Moon Wiring Club lurks over there.

summery emissions from the Blank Workshop

"After a prolonged period of wandering off, the sun this year has never been more actively malevolent. Seventeen notable cities have evaporated, and numerous picnics have been slightly postponed due to an overwhelming demand for decorative parasols. Simply the perfect time for Gecophonic to release Down to the Silver Sea, a special compendium on a glittering new sub-label ~ Gecophonic Audio System Productions. GASP!


"GASP!01LP almost certainly has the potential to accompany all of your extensive Summertime activities. Whether flower-pressing in the garden, hallucinating in the summerhouse, fainting inside stifling sites of historical interest, pirouetting along the promenade, or even sea-cruise thalassophobia complications, barely a moment will pass that isn't made all the sweeter by obsessively listening to Down to the Silver Sea. 

"Naturally, Gecophonic favourites, the Moon Wiring Club, feature on this Summer Special LP, providing enchanting melodies and foot-flapping rhythms that ensure a familiarity of confusion to sooth the fervid attentions of their kindly listeners. Joining them on Down to the Silver Sea are a magical gaggle of talented musicians, each flourishing a trio of delightful compositions that thematically compliment each other in a varied seasonal bouquet of charming sound!"

Available 33/07/1923 !

Initial concept of Mr Hodgson's was apparently the musical equivalent of "a British comic Whizzer & Chips/Buster summer special where they all go to the seaside", with sonics "somewhere between Coil's solstice EPs and Kanye's Cruel Summer. Or nowhere near."

More information on the contributions of the guest musicians, which include  Time Attendant, Jon Brooks, Sarah Angliss, and Howling Moss, can be found here.  

Check out Moon Wiring Club's "visual splicing" for one of the tracks: Knö ~ Morgane (aka Jon Brooks)

I knew it was only a matter of time before this stuff took on a certain remote-in-time allure -  at Nightvision blog here's Moon Wiring Club with "Midnight in Europe" - a mix of 90s ambient techno  -  names like Beaumont Hannant, Bandulu, Microglobe, Woob, Reload...

As Ian Hodgson writes, "there’s a uniformity here that dates the music, a pre-laptop sound. Large boxes and keyboards are being squeezed together. Some of these tracks are almost twenty years old (and getting older). However, as time passes by, many of them also retain a curious freshness, a quality that happily places them outside of time…"

Also at Nightvision, a conversation with Ian H

A coda to the post on Moon Wiring Club's Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets and the involvement of Sarah Angliss, who supplied recorder sounds. She tells me:

"Ian invited me to play on the album after he heard The Bird Fancyer's Delight - a documentary I put together about the use of birds as primordial domestic sound recorders, centuries before the invention of the phonograph. A lot of the recorder fragments on the album are based on eighteenth-century tunes, composed for birds to learn". You can check out Sarah's radio documentary here.

Ian Hodgson himself mentioned that the genesis of Today Bread came from him becoming "obsessed with pitching down birdsong and making rhythms around it."

Like Advent Calendars, round about this time of year, there's always a new Moon Wiring Club album.


Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets is slanted decidedly toward Ian Hodgson's ambient and ethereal side. When it does slip into beat-mode, the grooves are unusual: Ian tinkered with his PS2's time function and ended up with something like 6/8. A "Rococo" feel,  according to his friend Sarah Angliss (composer, robot maker, thereminist, historian of sound technology) who also supplied recorder samples for the album.

Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets comes in significantly different compact disc and vinyl versions, with some tracks not on CD and some tracks not on the vinyl.

This is a video for a track from the LP.

   And this is a video for a track from the compact disc.

Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets -- ruddy splendid.


Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets -- the perfect stocking filler

(well, if you get the CD)