BROADCAST & THE FOCUS GROUP: Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (Warp Records)

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Posted on Oct 15th 2009 01:01 am

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Broadcast & The Focus Group: Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age

BROADCAST & THE FOCUS GROUP
Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age
WARP189
Warp Records 2009
24 Tracks. 48mins36secs

Icon: arrow Amazon UK: CD | LP | DLD Amazon US: CD | LP | DLD Boomkat: CD | LP iTunes: DLD

There are few collaborations seeming more fitting than that of retro-futurist popsters Broadcast and library music collagist The Focus Group. Julian House, who heads the latter, and instigator of the Ghost Box imprint, is a graphic designer by trade, and has been responsible for every Broadcast record cover to date. His work is so much part of Broadcast that they described him as ‘like another member of the band’ when we interviewed them six years ago.

While Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age is officially labelled as a mini-album, its twenty-three tracks and near-fifty minutes allow for a fully extended narrative, inspired partly by Broadcast’s Trish Keenan’s and James Cargill’s relatively recent relocation from Birmingham to the market town of Hungerford, Berkshire, situated roughly between Reading, Bristol and Salisbury, a region rich in legends and with strong connections with witchcraft and the paranormal. Broadcast’s last record, Tender Buttons, released in 2005, was a bare and abrasive affair. This record is, very much like The Focus Group’s own outputs, a chaotic treasure trove of library sounds, noises and effects, clustered around miniature vignettes, layered to excess to invoke memories of a future as imagined in an era where televisions were in black and white and only ran a few hours in the evening, and where everything was still to be invented. Here, songs and instrumental snippets constantly step over each other, whilst Keenan’s voice, in turn in or out of focus, leading the way or hidden deep within clouds of sounds, left untouched of smothered in effects, appears to greatly gain in contrast here, its deadpan corporeality occasionally shrouded in a blanket of etherealism.

In the hands of The Focus Group, Broadcast’s original sketches become anecdotes in House’s haunting sonic collage, with only a handful of recognisable songs signposting an otherwise vastly overgrown and hectic soundtrack. It is actually pretty difficult to perceive where the contributions made by the former end of those made by the latter begin, so strong is the synergy between the two formations. The record reads like a dream, its disjointed shreds of story, bold psychedelic patchwork of seemingly random sounds and broken melodies all appearing totally unrelated to each other, yet held together by a common theme. This is further stamped by Keenan’s increasing use of automatic songwriting and cut-and-paste techniques, which she already experimented with on Tender Buttons, where words become more important than their meaning.

Borrowing equally from Broadcast’s pop tendencies and The Focus Group’s love for sonic patchworks, and building on their common fascination for library music and soundtrack, Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age is a totally unconventional release for either band, yet it is quintessentially theirs. It is also totally exquisite.

5/5

Icon: arrow Broadcast | Broadcast (MySpace) | Warp Records | Ghost Box
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3 Responses to “BROADCAST & THE FOCUS GROUP: Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (Warp Records)”

  1. THE 2009 REVIEW | themilkfactoryon 13 Dec 2009 at 7:53 pm

    […] & THE FOCUS GROUP Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age Warp […]

  2. […] is this setting that they presented this evening. There were, at times, echoes of the band’s recent collaboration with Julian House’s Focus Group, but these were brief moments, and often more contextual than […]

  3. […] of Surullinen Kohta Seinässä or Älä Koske Lintuja, which echo the richly ornate allure of the Broadcast/The Focus Group collaboration, to the amateur sci-fi sound effects and disarmingly simple melody of Ystävälliset […]