Single: Shreds / Flame Tree by Geiom & Appleblim
There were some white labels of this record a few weeks back, but by the time I saw them on Boomkat they’d sold out. Later that day I stumbled, distraught and confused, into Phonica, where a bemused Hector did an uncanny impression of someone who hadn’t listened to a bloody word I’d said and tried half-heartedly to fob me off with some other random dubstep stock I didn’t want. This is a great record as you’d expect from Appleblim and you can hear Geiom’s style in there too, particularly with the melancholy rave / dub chords. I expect it will pop up in a mix I’ll post on here soon.
Album: Ritual and Education (Ghost Box label showcase)
Great, another rabbit hole to fall down! I don’t really feel up to writing about this, suffice to say that at a £4.95 download it’s the absolute fucking bargain of the year, so I’ll refer you to the Guardian review:
The music…conjures up what David Peace might call an occult history of 70s and early 80s children’s television, the soundtracks of stuff invariably forgotten in who-remembers-the-Wombles? roundups: the station idents of long-lost ITV franchises; Schools and Colleges programmes; the grimy, low-rent British horror films that provided a cheap way of filling time until the Epilogue and attracted an unintended prepubescent audience thanks to the rise in portable bedroom sets; the public information films that suggested a flatly terrifying broken Britain, filled with people who spent their time Fooling With Fireworks, playing Frisbee near power stations and jamming the bare wires of electrical equipment into sockets with matchsticks.
There is so much more to it than that, though, and I’d urge you to explore the Ghost Box website and immerse yourself in the whole alternative-reality British Isles they’re creating. The guide to Belbury is essential, and the short story by Arthur Machen (argh! Another rabbit hole! There aren’t enough hours in the day…) has left a real impression on me. Ghost Box provide perfect full-immersion sensory input for the springtime (the most pagan time of the year, surely). I think I’ll be spending a lot more time in Belbury.
Video: Phenomena and Occurrences (Ghost Box)
Download: tapepacksickness.blogspot.com (found via Simon Reynolds)
Full rips of all those Dreamscape / Helter Skelter tape packs from the nineties. This is great music and a huge, huge nostalgia trip for me too. These tape packs were - along with magazines and flyers - the main connection me and my friends had to the rave scene in those days (we were just a little too young and a little too skint to go raving, although we certainly didn’t miss out on all the action. Still, don’t you sort of miss the days before the World Wide Web, when the underground was just that bit less accessible? Where as a kid in a hillbilly town you didn’t really know anything and just had to imagine where the records came from, instead of going onto MySpace and getting a definitive answer? We’ve traded magic and mystique for something, but what?)
I’m enjoying the jungle sets and the happy hardcore sets - at least, the older ones - equally: a joy. Massive respect to IronMan for taking the trouble to publish this stuff. It’s true what Simon says:
once your nervous system has been re-programmed, you can listen to this stuff ‘on the natural’. On its own, it’ll induce memory rushes, body-flashbacks.
When the M.C. asks how are you feeling, Dreamscape?….fuuuuck!