As you know, I’m super obsessed with Ghost Box, and just this week the collective dropped three delicious new tracks for their subscribers (it’s free, so you should sign up). I can’t stop, won’t stop talking about the mighty Ghost Box – who, as I’ve mentioned before, are more or less the most prolific collectors and composers “library music.” That is, all the Ghost Box artists sample, reconstruct, and rebuild the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and turn it into the springboard for their deep, spacious, glacial psychedelic electronic glitch movements. I absolutely love how each artist on Ghost Box creates a cohesive musical ambiance, and it’s always paradoxically retro and futuristic. The Focus Group in particular sounds like how the Atomic Age envisioned the future.
Ghost Box brings it heavy on the zone out times. If you love Silver Apples, Raymond Scott, or Broadcast, you need at least one Ghost Box release in your collection.
The Focus Group’s new release “We are Coming Back to Dance with You” is dense while creating a huge sonic headspace to take in each sound with profound consideration. As with most of The Focus Group’s catalogue, “We are Coming Back…” treads this weird, thin line between being tranquil and being spooky, sorta in the same vein as Music Has the Right to Children. And as prevalent on that aforementioned album, The Focus Group lays it thick on the bucolic imagery. This is pretty much the same with The Advisory Circle. “Energy in the Home” builds itself around analoge synths and what is, presumably, some public television program. Once again, futuristic in the most nostalgic sense. Some of my favorite songs feature random field recordings over vocals. It’s a good way to go, and you get plenty of that with both The Focus Group and The Advisory Circle.
MP3 :::
The Focus Group – We are Coming Back to Dance with You
The Advisory Circle – Energy in the Home
