Hynagogic pop is a genre term that has never really caught on. It was coined by The Wire's David Keenan to describe a musical trend that combines kitsch pop and analogue electronics with US mavericks Ariel Pink and James Ferraro at the vanguard.
Flawed though Keenan's label is, it is nevertheless a valid attempt to identify the way retro-culture has been defined and redefined by those seeking an antidote to the mad rush towards the latest technological gadgetry.
Another, more British centred, micro-genre that has fared better is Hauntology. This also denotes a sound which takes inspiration from a pre-digital past in order to create a future sound.
Hauntology is a playful reference to Jacques Derrida's philosophical ideas ('ontology') and is a name which was first applied in 2006 by Mark Fisher in his K-Punk Blog. It has been closely linked with Dubstep's Burial and the nostalgia-based exotica of the Ghost Box label.
In musical terms, the term denotes the manner in which ghostly elements of the past have come to haunt the present and there are plenty of examples of this to be found on the fascinating Outer Church compilation.
It is present, for example, in the spooky atmosphere which pervades the "wrong folk" of Cornwall's Kemper Norton where the creepy soundscapes of Melegez include a male voice speaking lines from traditional ballad The Butcher Boy "I wish I were a maid again".
We can also hear it in the haunted mood of Black Mountain Transmitter's Drawn In Silhouette which resembles a soundtrack to some dark pagan rituals.
This double album consists of 28 previously unreleased tracks chosen by Joseph Stannard, a music critic who, like Keenan, is on the team of The Wire as well as being a contributor to Mojo and The Quietus.
Here, Stannard is wearing his hat as chief programmer for The Outer Church (OC) - "the UK's foremost uncanny audiovisual event" - which discerning punters have been able to experience in Brighton since 2009.
All the artists, represented by a single track apiece, have performed at the venue with the exception of the sole American, Graham Reznick, who lives in New York but whose audio-visual work was projected in his absence.
Stannard refers to OC in typically cryptic terms as "a space in which various forms of unheimlich audio would converge with moving images of a similarly anomalous nature".
This enigmatic description will alert listeners to the fact that the album's contents are biased towards those artists whose work deviates from the norm and that any nods to mainstream taste are entirely coincidental.
Stannard's preference for unsettling music is evident by his deliberate choice of the German word "unheimlich", which means the opposite of homely.
Released through a Manchester-based label, the discs contain the kind of experimental sounds you would expect to hear on Resonance FM's independent radio station or on a Wiretapper or Below The Radar (BTR) compilation CD given away to subscribers of The Wire magazine.
So it's no surprise to note that Robin The Fog is the pseudonym for Resonance presenter Robin Warrren, or that Hacker Farm from Somerset has featured on a BTR sampler and Dublin's Angorwak has appeared on one of the Wiretappers.
The latter's I Hope He Had is an interesting piece of ethereal dream pop; like a skewed Irishman's take on Grouper. It is a described as "a spectral lament inspired by the doomed romance of Michael Hutchence and Paul Yates"!
Track one, disc one consists of the eerie ambient textures of Embla Quickbeam's Crystal Sea and the eclectic flavour of the compilation is immediately evident by the self conscious pop-tones of the follow up track by Grumbling Fur.
I saw this duo (Daneil O'Sullivan & Alexander Tucker) performing this track - Tilda Holds A Sword And Lilies - live at the Transmissions Festival in Ravenna, Italy and I find its pseudo New Romantic references as pretentious on disc as it was on stage.
|
In searching for ways to summarise the other artists involved, it's often impossible to improve on some of the grandiose descriptions in the press release. For instance, Position Normal's Siegfried & Roy is described as a delirious smear of electronic burble and improvised guitar clonk.
There are so many other 'smears' and 'clonks' elsewhere that the relatively uncomplicated Summer's Bird, a luminous slice of cutesy pop from Cambridge trio Hong Kong In The 60s, and Graham Reznick's rollicking beat driven thing Tomorrow In New York City come as something of a relief.
Sone Institute's breezy Time Itself is an up-tempo analogue disco tune which also has a broader appeal than other, more obviously leftfield directed tracks.
The most headache-inducing track is VHS Head's Freight Night, a cut and paste job assembled from sliced up videotapes. Time Attendant's manic WHOA! comes a close second as the most irritating track.
The award for best band name goes to These Feathers Have Plumes, although their An End To Drought is a doleful poem read by Paul Whieldon against a drone backdrop by bassist Andie Brown.
The cosmic dimensions are evident in the dub-techno of Broken Three's 96D, the deep ambience of Old Apparatus' Patter and the Jean-Michel Jarre-esque Thrones of Nitre by The Wyrding Module.
In such company, Waiting On The Beach by Brighton's own Wrong Signals is bright and busy but a little too conventional.
Meanwhile, on Black Mist, Ghost Box's Pye Corner Audio toys with Delia Derbyshire style radiophonics so that you half expect the Dr Who theme to blast out at any moment.
Some of the forays into spookier dimensions are interesting but a little forced. Vindcatrix's Huemanna is too mannered to be genuinely creepy, while Roehampton By Night by Baron Mordant & Mr Maxted and Robin the Fog's Unnatural History are both over-long explorations of twilight zones.
One thing the album teaches us is that the UK underground has a rich vein of female talent.
Paper Dollhouse (Astrud Steehouder and Nina Bosnic) offer a delicately sinister Swans while Anna Meredith's The Binks is one of the standout tracks; an elegant piece of looped electronica in a similar vein to Radiohead's 'Like Spinning Plates'.
It is left to the West Country's IX Tab to close proceedings with The Burned Wretch, an eccentric track which enters into the twisted psychedelic spirit perfectly.
If the intention of this compilation is to publicise a cool music venue then it achieves its goal effortlessly. If it means to show that the experimentalists in the UK are thriving then it also fulfils its remit in spades.
What's so cool about the record is that it has a cutting edge feel; suggesting that this is just a snapshot for a myriad congregation of scenes and sub-scenes that any intrepid musical explorer will be keen to explore further.
The Outer Church on tumblr
|
