You hurriedly park your Morris Minor Traveller outside
your pebbledash bungalow and tear into the lounge bedecked
in brown acrylic, feverishly removing the sleeve from the
new Focus Group LP, carefully lowering the 12 inches of
static crackling plastic onto your formica-clad
entertainment centre. Its creator, celebrated sleeve
designer Julian House (Stereolab, Broadcast, Primal Scream)
is an exacting collector of the tainted British parochial.
Obsessed by the twilight world of Diana Dors, Donald Cammell, Joe Meek and Delia Derbyshire, he crafts both
exquisite visual collages in thrall to European Modernism
(the moiré effects from the covers of penguin books,
Lettrism and Polish movie Posters) and divinely wrought
soundscapes that hark back to an eternal past.
The 19 instrumentals on Hey Let Loose Your Love Love
are so heavily woven that the fabric that holds them
together threatens to disintegrate. Detail isn't oppressive
in the least, merely destabilisingly delicate. Songs are
like lopsided Victorian automata, instruments mismatch in
incongruent tempos (one of House's stock sources are library
records in which instrumental parts for songs are separated
individually, tracks he proceeds to reconstruct
elliptically) and sequences frequently crumble into
soft-edged bliss before one's ears. It is almost as if the
very action of their exposure is the agent of their
collapse. Stranger still, though plainly audible,
occasionally the music seems to disappear from earshot,
becoming proverbially invisible, sinking into the
netherworld of the unconscious. Recurrent themes serve as
mnemonics luring the listener’s attention to the surface.
Pieced
together from the mustiest samples- children’s exercise
records, vintage BBC drama, clunky Brit jazz and (most
pertinently) library records, this is an archaeology of
emotion, a philosophically motivated exploration of the
power of not just one's childhood memories, but of the
collective unconscious. In the work of The Focus Group and
House's partners Belbury Poly ant Eric Zann at
ghostbox.co.uk (where the collective's entire output is
available), memory is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal
kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics.
