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

Broadcast
‘Elegant Elephant’
(From Mother Is The Milky Way, Warp, 2009)

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Prior to Witch Cults’ recording, Cargill and Keenan had relocated from Birmingham to the country town of Hungerford, a place the duo soon discovered was ripe with nearby witchy and occultist phenomena, from the haunted Littlecote House Hotel to nearby Stonehenge. While Witch Cults symbolized a cosmopolitan party thrown by occultists and country witches, Broadcast’s 2009 tour EP Mother Is The Milky Way was a fully bucolic recording, comprised of home-recorded demos of a more folk-inspired aesthetic quality, with the density of its predecessor stripped away to make room for twittering birdsongs, the laughter of children, and ambient marketplace chatter.

Keenan is our guide through an imagined Hungerford, and the record feels at times like a fictitious collaboration between Virginia Astley and Nurse With Wound – Kurt Schwitters even pops in for a beer and a bit of Ursonate babble. ‘Elegant Elephant’ is one of the EP’s more traditionally lovely moments and a perfect encapsulation of the quiet magic the duo achieve on Milky Way; it provides a rare peek into the more intimate domestic side of Keenan and Cargill’s life together, and even though it’s a fabrication, it’s no less striking.

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