Set your Programmes for Schools and Colleges countdown clocks: the new Belbury Poly album From An Ancient Star is available on February 1st from Ghost Box Records.

Sorry - steel yourself for a dull review, from someone who doesn't do this sort of thing for a living...

It's beautiful stuff, basically. Pretty much every track has a quirk, or a little twist, or an insistent motif that elevates it above the generic library music it seeks to emulate. From An Ancient Star doesn't rely on quite so many cheesy, tinkly-bonk lost TV themes (though they are there, thankfully) as previous Belbury Poly efforts. Neither, unfortunately, are there as many unnerving, shadow-in-the-corner tracks to put the 'haunt' into hauntology. Furthermore, it's not an album to listen to, as if it needs pointing out, if you're after originality - all the tracks are homages to the monologue sound of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and its compatriots in composition circa 1979, so expect quasi-baroque arrangements, plucked guitars, woodwind, vocodered snatches of indecipherable dialogue and incongruous folk influences aplenty.

The strength of many of the pieces is that they go off on sudden tangents, as if their fictional composers decided on a whim that their melodies were strong enough to support any style. Adventures in a Miniature World, for instance, starts and finishes with a flourish of flamenco Stylophone trills, but features a gentle pastoral interlude with flute and harp to the fore. And I defy anyone to predict where A Great Day Out goes on 1:46 - but it seems gloriously apt, for an age where composers were happy to throw whatever style they'd picked up from the pop charts into the mix.

If there's one niggling criticism, it's that the melodies do have a tendancy to to sprawl all over the music, where sometimes it would be better for the subtle backing tracks to come to the fore. But overall, if you like adroitly-crafted electronic melodies woven into the fabric of the half-remembered past, procure From An Ancient Star with all expediency.

I'll probably seek this out ...somewhere.

One thing: As nice an idea as it may seem, analogue plus monophonic does not equal monologue, Mumpo. That's something very different ...I hope!

I think I got my wires crossed.

I suppose it's not bona fide hauntology, and it may not be the recently re-released green vinyl version, but still... it's what the internet was made for.

(Things that go) Bump! (in the studio)

Quite strangely (I felt) today's 'issue' from 14 Tracks was about Hauntology. This seems peculiar at first glance, given that it seemed to have its '15 minutes' about two years ago, but I think that the small passage of time since then has allowed a certain perspective.

Here is their selection - a little more eclectic than you might expect. The inclusion of Burial caught me by surprise, for a start. (Glad to see Isan in there, though.) But, then, there have to be different kinds of Hauntology, really, as it surely has to be a time & location-specific phenomenon. Hauntology for one generation will be lost on another and vice versa.

For instance, just this evening I've been listing to Vector Lovers' 2007 album 'Afterglow', which has several tracks I would argue should perhaps have been in that list - 'Last Day Of Winter' and 'Rusting Cars And Wildflowers' for a start. But these are Hauntological in a very British/European kind of way. (He's actually German.) But it's just struck me that one of my favourite albums of this decade, John Foxx's 'Tiny Colour Movies' is also very Hauntological, but in a 'transatlantic' kind of way: some of it openly checks America as its source: 'Lost New York', 'Stray Sinatra Neurone', whereas others, such as 'Points Of Departure', are about burnt clothing on canal towpaths - a peculiarly British thing.

Anyway, really I'm just drawing this to your attention (not that there's anyone out there reading this!). But Mumpo - if you are there - I highly recommend both those two albums I've just mentioned. You'd love them!

<national anthem, followed by...>

-

If anyone likes their hauntology with added melancholy I reccommend the video my friend Eric's made a wonderfully moving video for the Japanese release of epic45's new album (bizarrely, they love their hauntological Englishness loads over there).

It was shot in the house of his Eric's grandad shortly after he passed away. Rather than let the memories fade away, he wanted to preserve the feel of the house he'd spent so much time as a kid in. He did so by using 80s analog recording equipment- bulky video recorders and cumbersome editing software. The result made me cry when I first watched it and still genuinely breaks my heart. The dead wasps on 1.21 are almost unbareable to watch.

Just to say I've been investigating epic45 over the last few days and can confirm that the video to which FH links is outstandingly good. I'm really getting interested in this kind of music, but the snippets of stuff I've heard on labels such as Ghost Box has never quite done it for me in the way that epic45 seem to - they have a fascinating blend of electronic and acoustic instrumentation, plus field recordings, but also mix experimentalism with a few killer pop melodies (it's the May Your Heart Be The Map and In All The Empty Houses albums I've been listening to). Any other recommendations gratefully received.

July Skies might appeal. Someone once described their (or his, really, as it's only one chap) music as 'like Vinni Reilly falling in love with Jenny Agutter', which is wonderful, although the influence of Pygmalion era Slowdive is pretty strong too. The English Cold (a hauntological look at The Battle of Britain) and The Weather Clock are the best places to start. Stunning artwork n all.

The EL Heath stuff on the label I help run might appeal too, and is all available for free. As well as making that epic45 video he's joined them as a live member and whilst his solo stuff is not hauntological per se, it's definitely informed by it. He's got an album inspired by the Snailbeach Mines in Shropshire out soon, which probably fits the label.

On a completely different not, I tell you what made me feel decidedly haunted the other day, and that's The Long Good Friday. Docks that are now financial centres and yuppie flats, blue and grey trains, Concorde and a great synth soundtrack.

Snailbeach mines are beautiful. My mum went to church in Snailbeach for a bit when I was a kid, and while she was doing that I got to look around the area.

You can hear the Snailbeach Mines Trust album on EL Heath's myspace page now, should you wish. Very good indeed: captures the dank claustrophobia, nostalgia and beauty of the place. I would particularly recommend 'Scott Level' (the chord change on 2:03 gets me every time) and 'Snailbeach District Railways' (same thing, but only 1:39 into this track!). 'Lordshill Engine Shaft' is ace too, in an early Aphex Twin-y kind of way, and the world definitely needs more Aphex Twin-y tracks inspired by abandoned lead mines.

Some people are doing a thing at a place, by the way.

Just listened to Portal's Options EP, which I heartily recommend to anyone interested in the poppier end of hauntology (although this perhaps abandons the 'uncanny' necessary to qualify under that term in favour of sheer nostalgia). The second track- 'They're Building All Over My Childhood'- which features vocals from epic45- is an unashamed mix of 80s guitars, 80s synth bass, 80s drum machines and nostalgia for city centres before the advent of out of town shopping centres ("they call it progress, I call it loss") and is really quite beautiful.

You can listen to and download the whole thing for free from the label's bandcamp page.

Couple of haunty things I've been meaning to flag up for awhile...

First off, The ASDA mix - a Moon Wiring Club exclusive. Moon Wiring Club are the brainchild of Ian Hodgson, whose Blank Workshop site attracted a little ridicule here some time ago for doing the hauntology thing too meticulously; but this mix, which has been on the Wire site for a few months now, gets the mood spectacularly right.

Cast your eyes down the beautifully-rendered track list and you will salivate at such delights as Paddy Kingsland's theme to The Changes, and Ken Freeman's Tripods theme. Anyone who heard Justice's album Cross from a couple of years ago must listen to Goblin's Tenebre, and lovers of green cathederals will rightly be delighted at the presence of Geoffrey Burgon's Hymn of the Plants/Floriana Requiem.

For me, though, the real jem is the inclusion of the Tomorrow's World theme. Now, if I was compiling a hauntological mix and wanted something from the BBC's premier future visions half hour, it would - as any sane person should agree - come down to a choice between Johnny Dankworth's efflorescent jazz score (for which, annoying, I can't find a title), or its radiophonic successor, the best track that Kraftwerk never wrote. MWC display a refreshing lack of rationality, however, and make the inspired decision to go for the late 80's incarnation, which you may remember vaguely or not at all. Two things are certain, though - firstly, a more inappropriate theme to a TV show has surely never been written... TW dips into the future each week and conjours up a disconcerting vision of mankind's uncertain prospects, but this theme, with its baroque trills and fanfares, sounds more like it was intended for Antiques Roadshow. The anachronistic overdubbing of a 70's public information warning about power shortages only serves to enhance the sensation that the future never looked further away. Oh, and secondly, it is a fearsome earworm which you should not expect to dislodge easily.

I said I had a couple of haunty things, didnt I. Hang on, then, let me post this, before I accidently wipe the lot.

14th May hauntological #2


David Cain - The Seasons
This, is perhaps the very quintessential distillation of everything hauntology is about. Dark poetry intoned over the forlorn piping of disconsolate analogue compositions, to which the youngest incumbents of the nation's schools were compelled to sway with mournful unease. Share in their distress whilst "the sun, as a wound, bleeds on the horizon". Sit, bewildered, as wanton May "leans with apple, tempts with peach". Hark to the teacher's call - "Timmy! Timmy Hatchworth! Put your plimsolls on and stop crying! You're supposed to be a gaunt elm shuddering within the groin of grief!"

This is, as I bleieve the current vernacular might have it, 'pure win'.

Mumpo...

John Foxx + Iain Sinclair + Ghost Box.

Wait for the anguished scream, folks...

Maybe this will make you feel better, Mumpo?

...Then again, maybe not!

A few things that have caught my eye recently:

An excellent article by Owen Hatherley in Morning Star. I hope to respond to this more thoughtfully when I have the time.

Look Around You on YouTube. I'd largely forgotten about this until a friend mentioned it recently. I caught a show once when I was about 16 and 'felt' the hauntology, but would never have been able to explain the feeling in words. Surprised to learn it was made by largely average comedian Peter Serafinowicz too: his Butterfield character is excellent but most of his comedy is horribly predictable. Robert Popper was the other guy behind it, and is responsible for brightening many of my craps with The Timewasters Letters (as Robin Cooper).

Of course, one of the best things about Look Around You is the music, by the fictional 'Gelg'. And lo! Here it is!

In the spirit of this thread as a resource for related stuff, someone's uploaded to Vimeo, here, a really good clip of epic45 doing Ghosts On Tape live at an indie club in Turkey the other day.

There are a few easily-found bits and pieces, but can any OTFers offer any commentary on the Moteer and Mobeer labels?