Hearing about the death of minidisc I went through my old discs and found several album’s worth of material I recorded around 2000 which I’d completely forgotten about. Usually performed live with early PC technology, the Transmissions (TX) series is inspired by the likes of Delia Derbyshire, Broadcast, Scanner, Negativland, Terry Riley and Boards of Canada and sounds quite modern strangely, fitting in with the recent trends of ‘hauntology’ and hypnagogic ghostwave music, the more out there witchhouse and interest in classic radiophonic analog sounds & horror soundtrack spooktronica.
The first release Transmissions 1: Forgotten Building is surprisingly musical, although far from a Kylie record – unlike the rest of series which mostly includes a lot of live radio scans and found sound collage, this is all original work…although I was surprised at the quality of the results given the low-tech equipment i had then (see below for geekage).
Not devised as a concept album, it seemed to suggest a story, so here is a sort of soundtrack to a tour of a old strange lonely house…(I refuse to use the phrase ‘imaginary soundtrack’ – already used up my allowance of wanky phrases with ‘hauntology’ alone! And yes I still hate that term…)
Originally recorded in the early 2000s, this probably would have been created on Audiomulch, with live digital signal processing from my soundcard and maybe even some FFT from a faulty noise processing plugin (more of that later in the series). I was fascinated with creating glitchy noise feedback effects or theremin/warm sounds of a Radiophonic nature. It’s surprisingly dark though.
And as with all the albums I’ve released on Bandcamp there’s a secret bonus track! Download is pay what you want, including free.
P.S. The image dates before 2000, from around 1992 during my art degree I had fun creating light trails in the old house I was living in…this is a remixed ‘spooky version’ of the original you can see here – and some of the rest of the pictures, which were in part about ‘the man on the top of the stairs‘ which I was scared off as a kid. Not there, or was he? I always ran down the stairs as a result, the landing spooked me.
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