Parapsihološka arhitektura povijesti Engleske odsvirana unatrag.
fandf.bandcamp.com/album/the-outer-church
Front & Follow present a collaboration with the UK’s foremost uncanny audiovisual event, The Outer Church. Chief programmer Joseph Stannard has compiled a stunning 28-track double album of all-new previously unreleased material from a host of conspirators including Pye Corner Audio, Ekoplekz, Anna Meredith, Grumbling Fur, Vindicatrix, VHS Head, Mordant Music, Hong Kong In The 60s, Kemper Norton and many more.
This exclusive collection comes in a deluxe double CD package, with a limited first edition of 300 in letterpressed sleeve by Red Plate Press (Manchester).
Joseph writes: “Wind the tape all the way back to Brighton in 2009. The uncanny influence seeping into contemporary music from ‘elsewhere’ had become impossible to ignore. Magazine pieces I had written in my capacity as a music critic were revealed to contain subliminal memos for my own attention. Unusually vivid dreams and unsettling anonymous telephone calls imparted curious instructions. I was to establish a space in which various forms of unheimlich audio would converge with moving images of a similarly anomalous nature. Equipped only with a well-thumbed copy of The Beginner’s Guide To Psychic Architecture, I resolved to build a Church.
“This compilation presents a selection of the artists who have performed at The Outer Church, with the exception of illustrious filmmaker and composer Graham Reznick, who lives in faraway Brooklyn and kindly permitted us to screen his tremendous psychedelic campfire tale, I Can See You, in Brighton and Dublin. All of the recordings here are previously unreleased. Together they advance the argument that something weird is stirring in modern music which resists categorisation, manifesting itself in unsettling cadences and temporal distortions across a wide variety of occult strategies.”
TRACK LISTING
CD1:
1. Embla Quickbeam - Crystal Sea
2. Grumbling Fur - Tilda Holds A Sword And Lilies
3. Some Truths - Some Truths #24 (Edit)
4. Kemper Norton – Melegez
5. Pye Corner Audio – Black Mist
6. Black Mountain Transmitter - Drawn In Silhouette
7. Angkorwat - I Hope He Had
8. Position Normal - Siegfried & Roy
9. Ekoplekz – Outercountry
10. BrokenThree - 96D
11. Anna Meredith - The Binks
12. Hong Kong In The 60s - Summer’s Bird
13. Baron Mordant & Mr Maxted - Roehampton By Night
14. Graham Reznick - Tomorrow In New York City
CD2:
1. Old Apparatus – Patter
2. VHS Head - Freight Night
3. The Wyrding Module - Thrones Of Nitre
4. Silver Pyre - Frosted Tropic
5. These Feathers Have Plumes - An End To Drought
6. Hacker Farm – Bluebeam
7. Robin The Fog - Unnatural History
8. Vindicatrix – Huemmana
9. Wrong Signals - Waiting On A Beach
10. Sone Institute - Time Itself
11. Tidal - Scry Baby
12. Paper Dollhouse – Swans
13. Time Attendant - WHOA!
14. IX Tab - The Burned Wretch
A 28-track double album compiled by Wire scribe Joseph Stannard, celebrating 4 years of his audio-visual clubnight in Brighton, The Outer Church. Open-minded but exacting, The OC gospel is rooted in the teachings of hauntology but roams further than that, mapping out an eldritch, eccentric new iteration of England's Hidden Reverse. All tracks on this comp are previously unreleased recordings from artists who have performed at The Outer Church, and the range is as impressive as the quality: from the end-of-the-pier isolationism of Embla Quickbeam's 'Crystal Sea' to the roiling, Beta Band-esque psych of Grumbling Fur's 'Tilda Holds A Sword And Lillies' and the lysergic electro of cult Brooklyn filmmaker Graham Reznick's 'Tomorrow In New York City'. Ekoplekz turns in one of his most accomplished, melodic and pastoral-sounding works ('Outercountry'), Hong Kong In The 60s find the sweet spot between Stereolab and Saint Etienne on 'Summer's Bird', Old Apparatus indulge their taste for darkling ambient on 'Patter', Vindicatrix channels Alan Vega via MTV Base on 'Huemmana', and Bass Clef adopts his Some Truths guise for the sumptuous analogue techno involutions of 'Some Truths #24'. There are lots of other familiar faces (the mercurial Hacker Farm, Baron Mordant & Mr Maxted, Robin The Fog, VHS Head) alongside compelling salvos from the lesser-known likes of Paper Dollhouse, The Wyrding Module and Broken Three, while the notional godfathers of this scene-with-no-name, Position Normal, weigh in with the nutty 'Siegfried & Roy'. Stannard suggests that taken as a whole these tracks "advance the argument that something weird is stirring in modern music which resists categorisation, manifesting itself in unsettling cadences and temporal distortions across a wide variety of occult strategies", and we're not inclined to disagree. - boomkat
The Outer Church is, according to the press release, “the UK’s foremost uncanny audiovisual event” run in Brighton by Joseph Stannard, who has curated this epic 2CD compilation which features exclusive tracks from all your favourite spooky weirdos. Pye Corner Audio is here, and Grumbling Fur, Angkorwat, Ekoplekz, Old Apparatus, VHS Head, Hacker Farm, IX Tab, Robin The Fog, Vindicatrix, Baron Mordant & Mr Maxted...they’re all here and quite a lot more - click over to the press release for more about that.
I’m having a listen through now and everyone seems to have brought their A game, there’s no throwaway tracks on this collection, just lots of spooked out late night pulsating and crumbling machinery, drifty broken melodies and the occasional ethereal voice. On the first disc I’m immediately drawn to Grumbling Fur’s dreamy layers of vocals, Pye Corner Audio’s trademark horror synths, Angkorwat’s otherworldly ghost-pop, and in particular the stuttering delicacy of Anna Meredith’s ‘The Binks’ with low rumbling synth drones and faltering computerised flickers conjuring up a yawning sense of solitude while a synth half-heartedly plinks out melodic fragments and a distant bass drum pulse drops in and out. There’s really too much on here to do justice to in the amount of time we spend on reviews, but if you’ve got a couple of hours to spare and a taste for the macabrely beautiful weirdness which the aforementioned artists construct, you’ll have a good time with this compilation. - Norman Records
Compilation albums: on the one hand they’re in the lowest echelon of the musical world, all those cheap pop collections you see in any supermarket; on the other they provide an introduction to zones of activity which might seem too rich or too obscure to easily investigate; Soul Jazz Records is a master at this kind of collection.
There’s also another level of compilation album where the collection becomes an opus in its own right, and which can also help to define a new movement or moment. In this category I’d think of favourites such as Kevin Martin’s Isolationism set from 1994 which first identified the emergence of what we now think of as Dark Ambient music; and Devendra Banhart’s The Golden Apples of the Sun (2004) which showcased a new generation of American folk artists. To these I’d add Joseph Stannard’s The Outer Church, a 2-CD set compiled for Front & Follow which is released this month. My hand-crafted, letterpressed edition just arrived so I’ve been relishing the new music after forcing myself to avoid the preview tracks which have been available for the past couple of weeks. Regular readers won’t be surprised to learn that the emphasis is very much on the Hauntological end of things; this blog nurses a Ghost Box fetish, and there are Ghost Box connections in the presence of Pye Corner Audio, Hong Kong In The 60s, and Baron Mordant. The latter pair and another artist, Robin The Fog, all provided tracks for the recent Restligeists, the cassette compilation that came with The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale. Of the new collection, Joseph Stannard says in his notes:
Wind the tape all the way back to Brighton in 2009. The uncanny influence seeping into contemporary music from ‘elsewhere’ had become impossible to ignore. Magazine pieces I had written in my capacity as a music critic were revealed to contain subliminal memos for my own attention. Unusually vivid dreams and unsettling anonymous telephone calls imparted curious instructions. I was to establish a space in which various forms of unheimlich audio would converge with moving images of a similarly anomalous nature. Equipped only with a well-thumbed copy of The Beginner’s Guide To Psychic Architecture, I resolved to build a Church.
This compilation presents a selection of the artists who have performed at The Outer Church, with the exception of illustrious filmmaker and composer Graham Reznick, who lives in faraway Brooklyn and kindly permitted us to screen his tremendous psychedelic campfire tale, I Can See You, in Brighton and Dublin. All of the recordings here are previously unreleased. Together they advance the argument that something weird is stirring in modern music which resists categorisation, manifesting itself in unsettling cadences and temporal distortions across a wide variety of occult strategies.
Illustration by Alexander Tucker.
And they aren’t the only ones exploring this territory: Demdike Stare and the very excellent Haxan Cloak might also have been included here. I am, of course, especially partial to any kind of doom-laden timbres, whether electronic, orchestral or guitar-oriented, so I can’t be an unbiased reviewer. But it has been a relief to see contemporary electronica (in the UK at least) find a way out of the rut of abstraction into which it had fallen in the late 1990s. That’s it’s done this by delving into our nation’s long history of ghost and folk mythology is no bad thing. Not all the artists on The Outer Church are attempting to spook their audience; there are songs as well as drones. Hong Kong In The 60s produce the kind of uptempo pop you’d expect from a band with that name. It’s to Stannard’s credit that he manages to sequence things without the mix of styles being too disjunctive.
One of the mini-postcards inside the limited edition. Photo by Joseph Stannard.
The first edition of The Outer Church has been selling well so anyone looking for a copy is advised to make haste and use the links on this page. There’s a related event in Brighton this (Friday) evening, and another in Manchester on Saturday. I’m now looking forward to following some of the paths revealed by this opening of the portals. - www.johncoulthart.com/
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