15 essential Broadcast tracks and the records where you can find them

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witch cults

Broadcast & The Focus Group
‘Make My Sleep His Song’
(From Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, Warp, 2009)

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While a former member of Broadcast was releasing new music on Julian House’s label, House himself was actually collaborating with Broadcast sonically as well as visually for the first time. 2009 saw the release of the first joint release by Broadcast and The Focus Group, an ambitious concept album with an equally ambitious title. The trio sought to make an EP that paid tribute to classic Hammer horror cinema and the idea of electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), but what emerged was a full album constructed from fragments of improvised recordings that Cargill and Keenan made together, vocal loops and incantations that Keenan recorded in her local church, and components of fully recorded songs that the duo had written. They then sent these to House, who helped assemble everything in a series of weekend editing binges that interwove Broadcast’s pop universe with the cubist concrète abstractions of House’s Focus Group recordings.

The album is easily the densest project either party has released, yet it somehow manages to transcend its parts to unify into a mesmerizing whole; like Roj’s Ghost Box album, it’s a journey that’s best taken from start to finish, but amidst all the wilful abstraction there are a number of satisfying moments that wink in the direction of Broadcast’s past. ‘The Be Colony’ welcomes the listener in to a tongue-in-cheek pop séance via a chorus of spectral Trish Keenans as a bass guitar plays itself in the corner, an electric organ toots in the next room, and a jazz drummer keeps time from two floors upstairs. ‘I See, So I See So’ features a stroll along a seaside boardwalk with multiple Trishes singing a nursery rhyme to the sounds of a harpsichord accompaniment, while ‘Libra, The Mirror’s Minor Self’ is a cut-up recitation of Keenan’s horoscope set to soft domestic clatter and a series of otherworldly bass tones and will-o’-the-wisp aural phenomena.

It’s ‘Make My Sleep His Song’ that provides the album’s most truly haunted moment. Amidst the collage of murmuring EVP and an ominously droning organ, Keenan sings an incantation from A Witches’ Bible in which the participant becomes complicit in the ritual. It’s a lovely break from the rest of the album’s incidental samples, disjointed musical cues, and chopped up vocal fragments. The album’s construction plays like a tribute to and recreation of an old practice that the duo were known to utilize when renting films from their former local video shop in Birmingham, which carried plenty of obscure cinephemera – they’d record the audio of the film to tape or Minidisc in order to get the soundtracks, but would also get the ambient sounds and dialogue, which Keenan often preferred to the actual soundtrack albums. Again, she loved the escape these recordings provided, and on Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, she crafted her own cinematic elseworld.