Ghost Box - Reviews

  
					David Stubbs, 
					The Wire

					April 2008
The Advisory Circle - Other Channels
This is Jon Brooks, aka The Advisory 
					Circle's first album proper for Ghost Box. He lives in 
					remotest Derbyshire, amid tapes of old analogue and Library 
					Music. One can picture him floating around in a lonely 70s 
					time bubble against the temporal permanency of Belbury Hill. 
					Prior to this, he released the EP Mind How You Go, which 
					showed that he is an aficionado of old Public Information 
					films - indeed, as a listening aid for Other Channels it 
					might help the listener to get hold of a copy of the DVD 
					Charley Says, a collection of short PI films broadcast 
					between the late 50s and early 80s, including their infamous 
					Protect And Survive guides to what to do in the event of a 
					nuclear attack, which are both comical and frightening. 
					Brooks has clearly drawn on this for inspiration, as well as 
					the grainy, often bleakly concrete soundtracks to these 
					broadcasts - hence, tracks like "Civil Defence Is Common 
					Sense" and The Coastguard". However there is a lot more to 
					Other Channels than simple surprise at dredging up rusty, 
					half-remembered memories of yesterday from the attics and 
					riverbeds of the subconscious. 
Brooks has done what all decent sample 
					based or concrete music should do - assembled something 
					organically new from the dead tissue of the old, something 
					which could only be conceived in its own time. Hence "Keep 
					Warm, Keep Well" and "Eyes Which Are Swelling". With their 
					deadly pile-up of barnacled analogue, sepia dub, will o'the 
					wisp windscreen wiper effects and granular transistor 
					interference, they represent a veritable topography of a 
					certain cultural area of nostalgia as experienced from the 
					unique perspective of the 2lst century although evocative of 
					the past, this sort of simultaneist layering is very much a 
					present day studio phenomenon. "Hocusing For Beginners", 
					meanwhile, sounds like what started life as a piece of 
					cheesy, mid-morning Muzak which has matured strangely and 
					become encrusted with age. However in contrast to the likes 
					of a Jeck or a Basinski, The Advisory Circle doesn't always 
					convey the past as distant, bobbing far and forever away, 
					but at times makes it feel almost shockingly intimate and 
					alive. The general reminders I get from Ghost Box music are 
					of the rheumy bliss of days off school, or the music they 
					cranked up during breakdowns in TV transmission - moments, 
					in other words, when time magically, mundanely and 
					momentarily stood still. These can be re-experienced most 
					pleasingly on the frozen halcyon likes of "Sundial". Other 
					moments, as on the Quatermass like mock horror of "Swinscoe 
					Episode l: Enter Swinscoe", are like monochrome flashbacks, 
					perhaps to moments of pure, gasping childhood terror - like 
					the Public information film moment in which a boy, running 
					barefoot across a beach, is about to step hard on a large, 
					protruding piece of broken glass. Brooks’s intermittent but 
					vividly fore grounded use of samples is key in this respect 
					Other Channels makes intelligent nods in the direction of 
					retro-electronica on "Everyday Electronics", successfully 
					conveying just how eerily, ominously new electronic music 
					sounded in the days before it become numbingly ubiquitous. 
					Meanwhile, on "Farmland, Freeland", Brooks wisely 
					acknowledges the curious role of the flute in futurisms 
					past, from Debussy through to Kraftwerk.
If there is any kind of political 
					agenda to Other Channels, it's in its occasional fixation on 
					Public Information broadcasting, one which is strongly 
					alluded to on his Mind How You Go EP concluding as it does 
					with the decontextualised admonition, Keep out! The voices 
					of impeccable male diction, here speaking in the 70s but 
					forged much earlier in the 30s and 40s, may be looking out 
					for your best interests - don't step on that frozen pond, 
					keep up to speed with civil defence  but what was then 
					soothing now sounds sinister. We no longer trust these men, 
					these apparent relics of a more reassuring, avuncular era 
					however although they do not operate as overtly in our lives 
					nowadays, they have not gone away. More fundamentally, Other 
					Channels intimates that while the past may be dead, the 
					ghostly imprints it leaves are very active and mobile, 
					effective and real.