Influences

The greatest musical hauntologists to ever do it. A whole career about timid ghosts and becoming less corporeal. Broadcast's music carries the spectre of spector, of library music, of French pop, and of European film, and reinterprets them through detached maximalism before further detaching from flesh at the start of the true digital age and becoming cerebral phantoms. Their works in the mid to late 1990s reflect a need to turn the artifacts of the past into the new avant-garde using the psychedelic maximalism offered by new recording technology which envelops the listener in sort of timeless, artifacted rift that dreamily blends time togeter. As a non musical comparitive take the Ringed City (and how time works generally) in Dark Souls.

HaHa Sound is some of the finest possible usage of that psychedelic maximalism, rife with chaotic noise and buzzing electronics which make immaculate use of the stereo field. This is one of the only albums I've encountered that deliberately starts FUCKING WITH YOU, THE LISTENER. A cacophony of spring reverb reflections and screeching overdriven strings creep into the mix of the opener Colour Me In, taunting the listener with atonal terrors over the simple nursery rhyme-like vocal melody. Pendulum uses a guitar like a good-humored banshee and starts to sound like it's literally laughing at you. Before We Begin utilizes soft vocal pads panned left with aggressive bitcrushed and spring reverbed soaked digital synths panned right, playfully trolling 60s sensibilties as everyone squirms into the digital age. The point is that it is wildly creative, avant-garde, textural, vibrant, and of course is backed by some amazing songwriting.
There have been numerous times in my adult life where virtually no music besides this sounds good to me, and I'll just listen to it on repeat. That's how good it is.

Trish Keenan: For me the paranormal is most powerful when it's unassuming, not obviously spooky or dark and I do feel synchrony and coincidence all the time.
James Cargill: Between dark and light, a sort of magic hour
- Interview with The Wire

TK: The Broadcast vision is the meeting of human emotion in the electronic world. The optimistic belief in the compatibility of man and machine. A nature and nurture approach to music. The potential of folk, nursery rhyme and electronica to provoke memory and imagination. The past set in the future. A retrospective lyric set in an electronic description of an organic world.
- 2005 beatz channel interview

Tender Buttons perfectly encapsulates the feeling of the digital and organic blending which understands ghosts not as horror but neutral wonder. While the ghosts of brill building populate the mass and vibrant spaces of Haha Sound, Tender Buttons traps them, forcing them to wander in the seemingly endless archive of the digital world, while understanding this too is ephemeral. This is musically represented by their interpretation of brill building turning to wailing ring modulated walls of sound and cold icy bitcrushed synths against the calm and detached nature of Keenan's vocals, and occasionally the dryness of Tim Felton's guitar. Keenan's automatic writing reflects contemporary communication norms, in pouring out raw thoughts only to understand them at a much later point. It encapsulates this message: It is ok to let go.

Rereading some interviews in preperation for writing this I once again notice how much Trish Keenan and I share in terms of artistic sensibility. Her propensity toward automatic writing that one may only come to understand later, the omnipresence of ephemerality in her writing, the way she understands memory as fuzz, and the celebration of detachment are all things that have become so present in my own art. Obviously I am incredibly influenced by her writing style which spirals this. What's so funny is how unimpressed I was the first time I ever heard Tender Buttons back in 2013 or so, on recommendation from an acquanitance. I guess that's coming from a version of myself that didn't understand the true depth of what "letting go" could mean.

Speaking of the fusion of the organic and electronic worlds, múm reflect the electronic music back into the earth. At their core they are not an electronic group, but one playing music stemming from more traditional folk music which uses that new technology to modify it. Folk music carries a long tradition of storytelling and múm's consistent usage of foley and percussive sound effects carries this sort of narrative, theatery feeling even when the stories being told are fragmented into schizophrenized pieces of sentences. The manipulation and sampling of these sounds is one of their primary usage of electronics alongside dithered sine plucks, staccato clicks of drum machines, machine noise, and watery grain delay. They combine this with a large host of folk instrumentation composed of viola, cello, mallet percussion, accordion, and melodica, and the close mic'd whispery vocals of Kristín Anna (Who also plays piano on Feels) which furthers this sort of fairy-like delivery. What keep's the calming, lullaby nature of songs like these from truly acting as such is that they tap into this feeling of primordial sombreness. It feels like leaving, like the unease of constant motion, and the endless expanse of isolation. What makes albums like Finally We Are No One so special is that they are so deeply intentional and meticulous with their texturization and composition that technically maximalist arrangements become quiet and introverted. It is such tactile, earthy music, the feeling of grabbing a handful of cold soil in the early morning dew.