Intermission

The pandemic parade of hastily assembled, but immensely rewarding, label comps continues with this bountiful batch from British imprint Ghost Box, a fine thing to haunt your household with.

They describe their roster as “artists exploring the misremembered musical history of a parallel world”, and their collective sensibility might be summed up as a vision of electro-pop fed by everything but pop music proper. Lines can be drawn, if you want, to library tracks for commercial licensing, mood music and self-help tapes, nature documentaries and archival audio files, sound installations in the loft district, even the auditory by-products of office tech – all as though the Top 40 never even existed. Ingredients are of course usually stewed in a thick, rich psychedelic sauce.

ToiToiToi’s “Die Dosis macht das Gift” validates the label’s name, popping the lid on a Pandora’s Box of noisy phantoms before resolving itself as a slice of schizophrenic exotica. Elsewhere, equally enjoyable are the clockwork synthwave of Pye Corner Audio’s “Photon Dust”, The Advisory Circle’s aspirational and/or motivational “Forward Motion”, and the vaporous dream-folk of Beautify Junkyards’ “A Garden by the Sea” and Sharron Kraus’ “Tell Me Why” (hope you like recorders). Justin Hopper’s spoken-word bits are fun, as are a pair of new tracks from the recently resurrected Plone, analog investigators in motion again after 20 years.

Buy it here, on their site, and your coin goes to Médecins Sans Frontières. Use the opportunity to check out their catalogue a bit.