WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

This is quite a long-running series, now! 

Not talking about the When Mates Make Books posts, of which there are countless, but specifically When Matts Make Books. 

Matthew Ingram has done a bunch, the prolific bugger that he is: the two blog compendiums The Big Book of Woe and  The Bumper  Book of Woe; the 1970s Lost Rock Albums monograph; his first print book Retreat: How The Counterculture Invented Wellness; and then The "S" Word,  a collection of writings about spirituality in alternative music. Not forgetting the graphic novel TPM.

And now here's the sequel-not-sequel to Retreat  -  a book about  the nexus of counterculture and horticulture - that comes out in the first week of April:

The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture

The Garden explores the transformative journey of the 1970s countercultural farmers and growers whose radical practices redefined how we grow and eat today.

Countercultural Roots: Chronicles how a generation influenced by psychedelics, Eastern philosophy, and reactions to Vietnam, the Oil Shocks, and DDT sparked a deep interest in sustainable farming.

In-depth Exploration of Influences: Covers movements like the organic food revolution, Permaculture, back-to-the-land initiatives, radical ecology, and the impact of thinkers like Rudolph Steiner on 1970s communities.

Impact on Today’s Agriculture: Through interviews with key figures, The Garden reveals how these visionary growers, often without farming backgrounds, pioneered alternative agriculture and influenced modern sustainable practices. 

A Legacy for the 2020s: Highlights the enduring impact of these farmers, providing inspiration for today’s efforts to reconnect with nature and rethink sustainable living.

Perfect for readers interested in organic farming, environmental history, or the cultural legacy of the 1970s, The Garden tells the untold story of how counterculture reimagined food and our relationship to the earth.

Endorsements:

"I admired Retreat. Fluid and intelligent and... I could go on! The new Matt Ingram is even better... With The Garden, Ingram recuperates an even more transgressive gesture: the counterculture's attempted rethinking of our first culture, agriculture." - Jay Stevens, author of Storming Heaven

"The idea of gardening and farming as acts of revolution and dissent may be unfamiliar to many of us, so it’s great to have Matthew Ingram’s brilliantly readable book celebrating the unexpected ways that individuals, communities, and movements have, simply by growing their own food, found green-fingered ways to stick it to the man.” - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, River Cottage

"Matthew Ingram has not only investigated a huge amount of material and talked to many people, he also has an ability to bring it all together in a way that makes sense and is fun to read." - Charles Dowding, No Dig

“Matthew Ingram has done all of us who care about ecological growing and a better world a big favour in this compendious but highly readable history of the gardening counterculture and its personalities. His in-depth, warts-and-all account of these past efforts will be endlessly informative for new generations wrestling with the demons of agricultural change, cultural change and climate change in our present, sobering times.” - Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future

"A fascinating and detailed account of the extraordinary people prepared to counter the march of depletive systems. Matthew Ingram beautifully describes the alarm bell ringing for hippies and far-sighted visionaries prepared to stand up for soils and sustainable practices. The Garden sheds light on the characters and events that have shaped the use of our land. For those of us searching for sustainable solutions to complex and overlapping problems, this book provides forgotten information and lessons from the past for the dilemmas of the present and the future." - Ian Wilkinson, FarmEd

"Matthew Ingram has preserved and enlarged a corner of history which few have visited or are even aware of. He narrates, with the page-turning excitement of a mystery novel and the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed it, a pivot point that had enormous implications. If we get through the converging crises of this decade, our future will be profoundly better as a result of the shift he describes." - Albert Bates, The Farm

Buy it here

There's a book launch  - open to the public, just register at the link - taking place at the Onion Garden in SW1 on Tuesday April 8 6.30pm

I've not had a chance to give it a proper peruse yet but I do know that Matt's gone at the subject with his usual deep-diving passion. 

Here's a mix Matt made of thematically attuned music and here are liner notes for the mix at Sick Veg. As he notes: 

Both “Retreat” and “The Garden” have large discographies in the back. This forms part of my mission to reconnect people’s interest in this music with the ideas to which it was originally conjoined. These ideas were what gave it its power.

Sick Veg is a think tank and grow lab that he's started, whose areas of investigation include  Agriculture, Community, Ecology, Food, Growing, Health, Nutrition, Organic, Practice, Regenerative, Soil, Spirituality, Therapy, the Urban, and Wilderness.

It's also a blog. And crikey, he's been posting there for a while now - images, videos and micro-essays. I had no idea. 

Here's a nice one on the gardens of his childhood. 

There's a YouTube channel as well! Flashback to the days of woebot.tv

As of now there's just the one video up there, about Stewart Home's book Fascist Yoga. 

Queasy Listening / Queasy Looking

Kieran with a fascinating Rabbit Holed dive into avant-garde ASMR - "from hyperspecific period roleplays to videos so frantic they're physically painful to perform..... this audiovisual internet-folk tradition is still evolving".

Of all the young-person stuff Kieran's introduced me to over the years, this might be my favorite. Feels like a completely 21st Century artform.  I can't really think of any precedents, whereas with most of the online music genres, as frazzled and overloaded and hyper-eclectic as they are, you can trace them back to late 20th Century constituents and starting-points, things like hip hop or jungle or electro or synthpop. Often they are supersaturated composites of all of those things and more (gabber etc). 

The fact that AvantSMR borders on - or outright bumrushes - the Kitsch  Zone just makes it more alluring.  The "cheese ahoy" warning signals, the cringe reflex -  this is your culturally-trained sensorium alerting you to the presence of the new. Push past the flinch.

The zoomed-in intimacy, the sibilant breathiness and crispy-wet micro-plosives that you normally only hear when you're millimeters from another human face - this creates a really peculiar atmosphere.  I'm surprised people find it relaxing (but then this is the experimental vanguard, so maybe it's not for that soothing sleepy-making function, or it's for the hardcore addicts who need to keep upping the dose, getting stronger and fiercer hits).

I suppose if there is a late 20th Century echo with this next one it is of things like Cyberdog and psytrance and such. 

I don't get the sought-for "tingles" (apparently these clips are really meant to be experienced through headphones, which I've not tried). But I do get a borderline-unpleasant stoned feeling. Everything too sharp, too vivid, too close. 

It makes me think of psychological techniques - holding eye contact with someone too long, a certain cadence of speech, huge smiles, invading personal space - that have a hypnotic or attention-compelling effect, such that you can't break away. Analogous perhaps to Moonie lovebombing. 

                                                        "girl has zero boundaries"

And then precursor-wise, with this next one .... steampunk? Some Goth-glam descended Japanese subculture (visual kei?) we've never even heard of over here?  

This is the 67th episode in an ongoing series - the amount of work involved in worldbuilding each one is staggering.

Feel like Moon Wiring Club ought to move into this area.  

Like this History Channel ASMR

Bringing a whole new level of "in" to "intimacy"

With this next one, if there's a precursor, it's with musique concrete that uses vocal material - also extended voice technique composition .... where there's a welter of wispy sibilant sounds and syllable-particles flying around. 

Andrew Parker alerts me to this possible precedent: Micromontage, "the arrangement of sounds (known as microsounds) on an incredibly small time scale. These sounds usually last from 10 milliseconds to less than a tenth of a second. By arranging and manipulating these sounds digitally, complex patterns and compositions can be made in ways that aren't possible via solely acoustic means. Horacio Vaggione specializes in micromontage, evident in works like Octuor (1982), Thema (1985), and Schall (1995). In Octuor, Vaggione synthesized and segmented sound files into fragments, mixing them into polyphonic structures. Thema utilizes automated mixing with streams of microelements like saxophone bursts arranged in varied patterns. Schall features sampled piano sounds, granulated and transformed to create detailed sound textures of varying intensities." 

Also coming at it from the other direction - a rustlescape

And this one, it's like Glitch Unplugged, a manual / acoustic version of clicks 'n' cuts

Okay this one is a pretty disturbing concept 

Also potentially panic-attack inducing, for most people, but then again seemingly a minority kink appeal

And as a Q-tip-phobe this one disquiets - is there such a thing as an anti-tingle?

And it's not all pretty young women with huge eyes. 

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Kieran also has a fun column on the new mega-splat from  Playboi Carti, imagining how it could be boiled down to a better album - an expansion on the old rockcrit kiss-off when reviewing double albums,. "it could be a killer single album". Except in this case he shows you how to condense and improve it.

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Roland B has some thoughts that apply equally to AvantSRM and Playboi Carti's post-continuity rap

“Writing aloud is not expressive... it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art...   Writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.

"A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema in asmr. In fact, it suffices that the cinema video camera capture the sound of speech close up… and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal’s muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss”

Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text

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Even more AvantSMR

For once someone with no make-up

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Lent edition : Position Normal, Ernest Berk, Daphne Oram & Thea Musgrave, Brian Hodgson, Reginald J. Lewis, melody snakes,Requiem For The Ontario Science Centre, Grykë Pyje, Stonecirclesampler, Belbury Poly versus Keith Seatman, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan,Shindig

I saw that American family sitting glumly in the tea room of the farm shop the other day. Although the dad may actually be a Brit - he’s got one of those grating in-between accents. Passing their table on the way to my favorite nook, I heard him muttering disagreeably about the deficiencies of the bagel that lay forlornly half eaten on his plate. Honestly, anyone with a pinch of sense wouldn’t order a bagel in that kind of place. A scone, a granary bap, a nice white roll, a flapjack… 

They do seem a downcast bunch. But I suppose having to move, lock, stock and barrel, in such a hurry... I really ought to make more concerted efforts to integrate them into the community, such as it is. But they don’t look the sort to be making jams or cheese straws for the church fete.

On to other matters....

Well, the big news in the parish is a new album by Position Normal - Modern & Unique 2.

It is indescribably good. Which I mean literally - I can't describe it. 

All the quaint creaky crinkled quirkily chuneful qualities of classic Poz Normal (Stop Your Nonsense, Goodly Time etc)  meshed with the  unmistakably digital-now.  A  sort of hyper-brite murk, cobwebbed with glinty glitches.  

I say that but looking at the press release, the sound palette is all acoustic and electronic, barely digital at all! And there's material, or constituents at least, in there that allegedly date back to the late '80s. Pre-Bugger Sod.

It's a headscratcher

Release irrationale: 

All lyrics and stories written and performed by John Cushway. Instruments played here:. Piano (a real one and a software one). Guitars: Aria Pro 2, Yamaha acoustic, electric Italia Maranello, Double Bass, Congas, Bongos, Tambourine (wooden), Shakers (one egg shaped, the others are all made to look like fruit and vegetables). And synths.

2 samples though. One of a dog barking twice and a drum and bass sample from a 90's D&B Sample CD on the last hidden secret bonus track Techno Non-Stop (Party Party Drugs).

This whole album spans from the late 80's to now.

Recorded onto VHS.

credits

Music: Chris Bailiff

Lyrics: John Cushway

A bonus track not on the album

Oh and look here - a film about or involving Position Normal

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Activity from the village elders! 

Including posthumous activity...  which is pretty ghostological if you think about it. 

Now I remember as a boy cycling past Pendley Manor and slowing to a near-wobble as the big lawn came into view - goggling at the contorted calisthenics cavorted by what looked like naked or nearly-naked figures. Turns out this was the dance troupe of Ernest Berk, an avant-gardist in exile, whose radical choreography was accompanied by equally radical electronic music for movement composed by his good self. 

Trunk already issued a chunk of this stuff (Electronic Music for Two Ballets) but somehow I missed the heaping double-CD portions of Berktronica that came out last year via the Huddersfield Contemporary Records label - a bumper serving of the first of these two sorts of avant-electronic that I really really can't get enough of.

Release irrationale: 

This double CD represents the first substantial publication of the electronic music of Ernest Berk. Only two works from his catalogue of over 228 pieces were published during his lifetime in the early 1970s. Following the collapse of the Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln in 2009 it was generally thought that all materials were lost. The project team comprising Prof Monty Adkins, Dr Sam Gillies and Ian Helliwell have managed to source early digitisations of some of the master tapes from Martin Kohler (who was a PhD candidate at the time) as well as other sources across Europe. The project team have then selected 18 representative tracks from Berk's oeuvre composed between 1957-1984. They have then worked with Dr Richard Scott and Jos Smolders to digitally remaster these works for this release. The CD features a bespoke cover design by Ian Helliwell and has been produced by Monty Adkins. Extensive liner notes about Berk's work have been written by Adkins, Gillies, and Helliwell.

Ernest Berk was one of the earliest and most prolific composers of electronic music in England and yet his work is almost completely unknown to the wider public. With only a few pieces ever made commercially available in limited circulation, much of his output has since languished in obscurity until now. Huddersfield Contemporary Records is pleased to release this newly restored and remastered 2CD collection of the work of Ernest Berk.

Berk was a true polymath, working throughout his life as a composer, percussionist, dancer, choreographer, teacher, actor, and mime artist, often assuming many of these roles in the same project. He composed over 228 works of electronic music between 1957 and 1984, many of considerable length and often used to accompany his own expressionist contemporary dance productions. Diversed Tapes is a compelling overview of Berk's revolutionary catalogue. The collection includes End of the World (1957), his first work for magnetic tape, and one of the first electronic works composed in England, and Diversed Mind (1967), his work for one of the first public concerts of electronic music in England at Queen Elizabeth Hall and performed alongside music by Daphne Oram, Tristram Carey, and Delia Derbyshire. 

Berk's music is at once radical and yet still accessible, rooted in a deep appreciation for melody and rhythm. Listening to this collection in a contemporary context, one cannot help but be struck by how much his music prefigures more current musical trends. Tracks such as Wings Over the Valley of Death (1961) and Kali Yuga (1962) utilise the sorts of dark ambient droning soundscapes that are ubiquitous in electronic music today. Vibram (1973) is a long form electronic improvisation evocative of contemporary modular synthesis performances. Against 7/4 (1967) and Janet Calls it Blue Ribbon (1972) contain the kinds of sophisticated electronic music gestures that evokes connections to later works of acousmatic music by figures such as Bernard Parmegiani. This is more than just a document of the past – rather, there is much to be enjoyed here by contemporary ears with contemporary musical perspectives.

This compilation is still just a small selection of the music Berk wrote during his lifetime, but it is an attempt to illustrate the diversity of his catalogue. Richard Scott and Jos Smolders have worked tirelessly to restore and remaster these, until now, lost recordings to bring out their greatest possible shine, and to allow us to finally throw a light on this important body of work.

An older post on Berk and Berktronica

Below a BBC documentary with a section on Berk in his prime - the dancing and the sound-shape-making

For a glimpse of Berk's troupe at their most flagrantly nakedelic hie thee to this age-restricted video (the sonix are mental!) 

Berk is described as a committed "naturist and eroticist" - his (ex)-wife Lotte seems to have been quite a freeethinker herself, abrasively so even.

Jack Dangers at Electronic Sound on Berk's solitary and incredibly rare release during his lifetime - and stuff on his life and Lotte. 

More electronic ballet music from the venerable and (like Berk) long-no-longer-with-us Daphne Oram - Beauty and the Beast, a collaboration with the composer Thea Musgrave, made for the Scottish Theatre Ballet in 1969. Released with minimal fanfare only days ago. You don't seem to be able to buy it in solid or immaterial form anywhere - but it's out there on the streamers and YouTube. 

Clangers-tastic stuff. From Daphne's heyday at the Institute up Dancersend way.

Standard Music Library seem to be putting out a bunch of vintage stuff, some of it a bit 80's and hyperbright, but some fine work by familiar names like Brian Hodgson, such as this spacy 1975 effort Encore Electronic, a collaboration - or perhaps simple adjacence of compatible works - with a less-familiar name, Reginald J. Lewis. 

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Younger elders, if that makes sense - a rare sighting of... but I'm sworn to secrecy. Or rather charged with the challenging duty of alerting without revealing. Let's just say, if you ever h.arked to the waftings of A.R.Kane's fellow-travelers and sprite-children, give a glisten to these emissions from melody snakes. Not really "hauntology" but the next parish over, yet certain to trigger ghostly tremors in the memoradelic sector of the brain for some of us.

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A missive from our Canadian twin town East Gwillimbury!

Tony Price alerts us to his latest project, Requiem For The Ontario Science Centre - self-released on Maximum Exposure and described as “a sonic eulogy to my favourite work of art: The recently shuttered Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, a world-renowned brutalist architectural wonder designed by Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama as a centennial project for Canada. It is a stunning landmark that is largely representative of the post-war utopian outlook that permeated through Canadian culture in the 1960s. Last summer, the Conservative Government of Ontario announced its abrupt, unexpected and controversial closure, a decision that was supposedly based on an engineer’s report warning of a small percentage of roof panels at risk of collapse after decades of neglect. 

“Musically, this record is almost entirely made up of synthesizers and saxophones, played by Toronto avant-garde saxophonist, Colin Fisher. If I had to throw you an elevator pitch I would say it sits somewhere between Terry Riley, Fripp & Eno, Boards of Canada and Don Cherry's "Brown Rice".”

Neat parameters and it does actually fall squarely into that quadrangle

The inspirational touchstone and monument to bygone utopianism

God bless and protect Canada and the Canadian people!

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From our Italian twin town Potenza Piscene...

Fast approaching their tenth anniversary of operation, Artetetra (have we reached 6th World  Music yet?) release the evocatively titled Crepuscular Elixirs by the German-Finnish outfit Grykë Pyje in just a few weeks time. You can hear most of it already here. 

release irrationale: 

It has been six years since Grykë Pyje (forest ravine in Albanian) stretched out their high sensitivity feelers for the first time into the greatest of outdoors to bring us fascinating, multilayered soundscapes and introduce audiences to their signature, crystal-clear fifth-world compositions. Working on the idea of using music as a way to pierce the fabric of myths from yonder thanks to a wide array of synthesis, sound superimpositions, patchworking and manipulations, blending hazy shards of experience and imagination, in their fourth LP, "Crepuscular Elixirs", Grykë Pyje spins further adrift from its previous works, trying to increase the level of intricacy.

If recent experiments engaged with the sonification of sacred herbariums and the reimagining of chants and myths from the animal kingdom, for the brewing of their latest musical potion, tracks were built around skew and Oddly-hypnotic resemblances of grooves dodging well-trodden patterns. These bumping and stumbling primal rhythms pervading the album were inspired by the inconsistent pulse and timbrical variety of animal noises: a hammering woodpecker, croaks and ribbits from frogs or the scraping of ants at work. Rhythmic backbones were used as free territory to imagine the entire and alien world around the sounds of this pseudo-fauna.

Indeed Crepuscular Elixirs is an apt title for this bizarre conflation of fiction and natural science, magical miniaturism and microscopic realism. With its bizarre world of supernatural charlatans, hazy incantations and invisible accesses to an impossible bestiary, Grykë Pyje creates sixteen tracks of pure audio alchemy where it’s impossible to retrace the songs’ various layers, rather compelling one to listen to the compositions as a moving thing in its whole. Sounds lift up one another creating texture, mimesis and confusion, incredibly entangled, blurring the line between transmutation and sonic manipulation.

With Crepuscular Elixirs, the duo’s organico-mineral soundscape is sharper and more detailed than ever before. A type of listening requiring allure and curiosity, but that repays with a seemingly endless rediscovery and wonder. Now let this seemingly alive bag of sonic illusions open a new chapter in the excitingly chaotic, fantastic world of Grykë Pyje!

"Potion Seller, I am going into battle and I need your strongest potions."

"My potions are too strong for you, traveler.” 

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Here's a recent-ish mix made by Luke J. Murray aka Stonecirclesampler for The Wire. 

"The mix is a hauntological blend of washed out ambient, dub and grime, threaded together with samples from horror films and TV."

Tracklist

Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler “Stonecirclesampler Hauntology Primer (Intro)”

Stonecirclesampler “Television Of The Stones (Rainfall version)”

Liquid DNB-like Ambient Grime 2 “Forthcoming Untitled Ambient Grime Dub 12" (Old Grime White Label Wire mix version)”

Stonecirclesampler “The Stone Tape (Wire mix edit)”

Stonecirclesampler “A Drift In Seaburgh (Wire mix edit)”

Rainfall Widens The Cracks In The Concrete “After Dark (Stonecirclesampler version)”

Stonecirclesampler “Memorex Dub (The End Of Techno instrumental edit)”

Old Grime White Label “Forthcoming Untitled B-side (Superior London Pulp edit)”

Stonecirclesampler “The Drift VIP”

Stonecirclesampler “Save The Stones! (Deep Dream Ambient Grime mix)”

Stonecirclesampler “Megalithic Grime Radio Documentary (28 Stonecircle Wire mix version)”

Old Grime White Label “Unknown (Stonecirclesampler A303 Acid rebuild)”

Stonecirclesampler “Megalithic Grime VIP (Stonecirclesampler Wire mix version)”

Liquid DNB-like Ambient Grime 2 “Forthcoming Untitled 4x4 Grime Techno 12" A-side (Stonecirclesampler Rainfall VIP)”

Old Grime White Label “After Leaving The Cliff Overlooking The Pacific Ocean, Rainfall Began To Fall Silently On The Car Roof (Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler version)”

Stonecirclesampler “Save The Stones! (Rainfall Widens The Cracks In The Concrete Slowed Down VIP)”

Superior London Pulp “The Real Occults In The Pubs Of The East End (Wire mix acid edit)”

Old Grime White Label “Untitled 2010 Techno (Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler Fourth Dimension version)”

Stonecirclesampler “Haunted Goth Ambient Grime (Breakbeat mix)”

Stonecirclesampler “After The Ice Age (Frozen Grime mix)”

Stonecirclesampler “Penda's Fen (Wire mix edit)”

Superior London Pulp “The Green Man Inn (Old Grime White Label's Ambient version)”

Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler “Ghost In The Water (DISMAL edit)”

Superior London Pulp “Maybe A Door Will Open Somewhere (Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler Haunted mix)”

Stonecirclesampler “Deep Dream Derbyshire Gloom (Liquid DNB-like Ambient Grime 2 Dub)”

Old Grime White Label “Rainfall Falls Silently On Concrete Rooftops (Ambient Grime edit)”

Stonecirclesampler “A Bygone Age (Rainfall version)”

Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler “Shivers Of Weird Landmarks, The Time Is Out Of Joint (Outro)”

A postcard from Luke alerts me, and now you too, to a new release: 

"Just put out a village inspired 7" single last week called 'Somebody's Found Your Allotment' after seeing a sign for a missing bike outside an allotment gate near where we moved to recently, the title I thought has a sort of weird yet brilliantly funny slightly off-kilter energy! I was going for a bit of an early Ghost Box drift energy, swanning about on a secret allotment with lots of spring rainfall and shivering gloom!"

Hear it and purchase it here 

It's  excellent - doesn't really remind me of Ghost Box, though - if anything maybe the train tracky echo-delay after-trails music heard quite early on in Stalker ... meets Burial "South London Boroughs"

Actually Luke J / Stonecirclesampler  seems to have a small flurry of releases recently: 

A long track with an even longer title  - The Neolithic Stonecircle Near The Record Shop With A Hauntology Section & The Rituals, Traditions, Morris Dancers & Folk Plays In The Village Pub Through The Mysterious Green Door Past The Bronze Age Burial Mound In The Conservation Area With It's Inland Water, Murky Depths & Unseen Serpents

And then an expanded version of the Wire mix as a double-cassette ultra-ltd edition thingy 

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Talking of Ghost Boxiness... here's a Belbury Poly remix of a Keith Seatman tune - brief preview here below but fully available only as a vinyl single via Castles in Space Subscription Library Singles Club

It's a taster for a new KS album Counting to Ten  Then Back Again

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Release irrationale:

Overspill Estates EP is a new four track EP from Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, which delves back into the Your Community Hub sessions to uncover some gems that had been forced off the album.

Gordon Chapman-Fox, the genius behind WRNTDP says “I’d worked on these tracks for the best part of a year, and, in my mind, they were a fundamental part of the whole Your Community Hub project. I was heartbroken when they couldn’t make it onto the album, so it’s an enormous relief to see them come to life here.”

The initial concept for the fifth WRNTDP album was to expand beyond north Cheshire, and dedicate a track to some of Britain’s other New Towns. Being part of the project from early on, these four tracks were dedicated to Basildon, Cwmbran, Redditch and Harlow. To give an idea on how long these things can take to gestate, the opening track "The People Of The Town was performed at the End Of The Road Festival in 2022.

The album cover is an image from the half-modernist, half-mock Tudor houses that were built in Birchwood, Warrington in some of the last large scale building projects that were part of the New Towns.

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Finally Shindig recently devoted a large and lavishly illustrated article by Camilla Aisa, to the subject of Hauntology,  which includes a gargoyle photo of yours truly for reasons unknown, and quotes from Beautify Junkyards and Jonny Trunk....

Why now, I wondered? 

Then suddenly it occurred to me that  - instead of monumentally tardy,  it might in fact be topical and even jumping the gun ever so slightly. For later on this year... it'll be the 20th Anniversary of Hauntology...   if not as an emergent sound-zone  (you could date that to 1999/1998 - Stop Your Nonsense, Music Has A Right To Children) then as a christened phenomenon...

Some sneaky snaps I took hastily, furtively, while in the village newsagents.