2008 Favorite Music

By Alex - 6:31 PM


The Advisory Circle - Other Channels

'What the 70s really looked like' goes the tagline for "The 70s Dimension", the idea being that the utter marginalia of a time (the disc compiles inane TV commercials) speaks more truthfully than a run-through of iconic images. The DVD is a release off of Craig Baldwin's label - Other Cinema - and these are indeed the very frequencies of Other Channels, the same broadcasts of memory & archival delirium. Channels, as in changing by remote, heading into an unreliable past left indistinct & disproportionate. Childhood here is diffuse and roaming - a string-section swoon (equally applicable to spy romance or an ad for a furniture sale), might be followed by oscillators and blown bottles (i.e. John Barry *click* John Baker). Fixations of prequel EP Mind How You Go also get a renewed season: those public information films - here the disquieting "Frozen Ponds PIF" - and a lot of Roger Roger style library synths. Probably the most diverse Ghost Box record so far, maybe even the first in a marked departure w/ its Penguin book-cover traded in for a polychromatic 16mm dissolve. What would a widening spectrum imply - examination of a less specified collective unconscious? Or maybe just a later one, w/ a vague chronological drift forward/backwards alongside present time. A speculation is haunting me.


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