Stewart Lee, Sunday Times Culture Magazine
15th July 2007,
Review of Mount Vernon Arts Lab - The Séance at Hobs Lane

Under various aliases – the Focus Group, the Advisory Circle, Belbury Poly – the secret chiefs of the Ghost Box label craft an apparently unique strand of British electronica, drawing on library recordings, 1970s schools television and psycho-geographical theory. But, lacking a genesis myth, they’ve exhumed Mount Vernon Arts Lab’s forgotten 1999 album, The Séance at Hobs Lane, which anticipated their innovations, and repackaged it in the livery of their own releases, fabricating evidence of a musical movement. The spiralling cello of The Black Drop has an eerie resonance, and Sir Keith at Lambeth’s shimmering oscillations trigger Proustian memories of teatime terror.