This welcome reissue of Mount Vernon
Arts Lab’s 2001 album suggests that the progressively groovy
Ghost Box label is now so far advanced into the future that
they’re prepared to bring the past along with them. The
brainchild of composer Drew Mulholland, the project’s title
alone twitches and seethes with enough occult and pop cult
references to set the senses reeling. As featured in Nigel
Kneale’s TV series Quatermass and the Pit, Hobs Lane
was the site of numerous disturbing apparitions, where
ghosts and goblins didn’t even wait for the formality of a
séance to start showing up.
Mulholland’s visionary approach to
London’s hidden spaces and uncanny secrets embraces skewed
references to Sir Francis Dashwood and The Hellfire Club and
old submarine yards on the Thames just upstream from
Hammersmith Bridge. Everything is darkly alive, and with
VCS3 synthesizer, theremin and guitar he conjures up
sinister whirring vibrations that seem to come from deep
beneath the ground. Adrian Utley’s analogue synth on
"Warminster 4" recalls Glynis Jones’s work at the BBC
Radiophonic Workshop in Maida Vale during the early 1970s,
while the rolling reverberations of "The Mandrake Club" echo
Tristram Cary’s soundtrack to the 1967 film version of
Quatermass and the Pit, created at the Royal College of
Music. Remixes from Coil and Barry 7 of Add N to (X) manage
to suggest where the music is going as well as where it’s
been.
