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

Broadcast & The Focus Group
‘Inside Out’
(From Familiar Shapes And Noises, Ghost Box, 2010)

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Familiar Shapes And Noises was Broadcast And The Focus Group’s entry into The Ghost Box label’s Study Series – a collection of 7″ singles that offered slight deviations from the label’s manifesto toward more easily digestible pop structures. Broadcast And The Focus Group’s contribution was a delightful three-song single that took the spectral ambiences of their collaborative album, compressed them, and gave them a less crooked rhythmic spine. The single’s A-side ‘Inside Out’ is one of the collective’s most satisfying moments, concentrating the strengths of both parties into a mesmerizing freakout with a musical arrangement akin to compressing The Faust Tapes’ 44 minutes into a four-and-a-half minute pop single.

The project’s promise was sadly cut short when Keenan contracted pneumonia after being infected with the H1N1 flu strain. She and Cargill were hard at work on both a new Broadcast album and the score to Peter Strickland’s 2012 film Berberian Sound Studio at the time. Cargill finished the score and released it to much acclaim in 2013, and he has said that there will be one final Broadcast album of proper songs.

Trish had recorded all of her vocals for the album and, aside from a new project with House and Roj Stevens entitled Children Of Alice, finishing this final Broadcast album has been Cargill’s recent focus, one he refers to as “a monument and a tribute to her rather than this obsessive thing I used to have about making albums.” Regardless of what may happen next, one thing is certain – more admirers than ever before are ready to pay their respects at the foot of the Broadcast monument.

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