Mike
Powell, Stylus
October 2006
Review of Belbury Poly's The
Owl’s Map
Nearly every American born within the past 40 years has had
the realization that Ernie and Bert, the felt-faced
cohabitants of Sesame Street, were probably gay. As
kids, we didn’t know and couldn’t have cared; if we were
going to learn division, having a jigging puppet to teach us
was a cupful of sugar. Post-puberty, these facts start to
rise up as hallucinations. I was counseled on the values
of friendship by a massive canary and never thought twice.
The subtle strangeness of public television and
instructional film isn’t limited to children’s shows;
I’ve spent nights literally, eight hours slowly drooling
in front of BBC documentaries like The Life of Birds
or Jacques Cousteau episodes on VHS. What shrub will odd
little David Attenborough pop out from next? What seemingly
fanciful journey will Jacques and his crew conduct fathoms
below the surface of the ocean today? And, of course, what
will soundtrack it?
The British label Ghost Box would very much like to weird
you out to the rhythms of these half-remembrances; to say yes,
some of the most otherworldly records you will ever hear
were commissioned by a bureaucrat at a national arts
council; yes, sometimes mood music can also be
head music; yes, Satanists wear tweed. In
cobbling together the neutered, institutional sounds of
commercial public broadcasting with twists of folk arcana,
ambient, and streaks of the occult, the four artists on
Ghost Box have managed to make a new strain of psychedelia
instead of your intellect or perception, they want to trash
your cultural memory.
Jim Jupp’s previous album as the Belbury Poly, The
Willows, was a deep dive into pastoral muzak that
suggested Boards of Canada free from their distancing, pre-fab
sonic decay the thing that made them safe and cool in the
first place. Chintzy synths spilled into zither and melodica
lines; recalibrated samples of hundred-year-old vocals were
trapped like an EVP reading of an old English cottage. A
little night music.
The Owl’s Map is significantly more diverse than The
Willows. And while much of Ghost Box’s project rests
on the stylistic reanimation of Old, Weird referents, some
of the material towards the end of the album particularly
the kitschy regalia of Lord Belbury’s Folly, the
Broadcast vamp of Scarlet Ceremony, and the vocoder
jingle of Your Way Today loll like good exercises
rather than the dark, nuanced music Jupp is capable of.
But the album’s variety turns out to be its strongest
suit. Itty-bitty Ghost Box has accidentally squeezed out its
first compilation. The tense webs of The Willows
reappear in The Moonlawn, the thrilling sample Ouija
of the Focus Group haunts Pan’s Garden, the dark
ambiences of Eric Zann get balled up into gorgeous Enoisms
on The People, and the Advisory Circle’s fanfares
for brave new worlds of progress first nicked from Yellow
Magic Orchestra herald The New Mobility. And Jupp, to
the best of his ability, makes these things his own.
Belbury Poly’s music, while ripe with anodyne melodies and
soft-toothed waveforms, is unsettling. What unsettles, of
course, isn’t just the thought that all the snoozer
science reels called to memory were actually much more
quietly batshit and fascinating than I’d ever realized as
a kid. It’s the possibility that my memory has distorted
it even further, that my reaction to Jupp’s music is
itself queasy, misfired nostalgia. Heaven only knows how
I’d squirm in Big Bird’s arms today.
