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

Broadcast
‘Echo’s Answer’
(Warp, 1999)

Listen / Buy

One of the most haunting and beautiful songs in Broadcast’s catalogue, ‘Echo’s Answer’ was the first real taste of Broadcast’s debut album. A sharp contrast to the maximalist jazz discordance of ‘Hammer Without A Master’, the stripped-back ethereality of ‘Echo’s Answer’ was almost shocking. Keenan’s quiet delivery of a cryptic yet sinister lyric, surrounded by little more than ring-modulated piano and electronically manipulated string samples, showed a maturation and refinement of the band’s approach.

It recalls both The United States Of America’s ‘Love Song For The Dead Ché’ and obscure Belgian chanteuse Claude Lombard’s 1969 Ondes Martenot-infused ‘Sleep Well’, though Keenan strips away the sentiments of those songs and recites in its place a resigned ballad of imprisonment. Her love of these artists and subsequent appropriation of their methods was an attempt to reimagine “a better Sixties – one without sexism or racism,” as she put it. “I discovered psychedelia, and it seemed to have self-help properties that allowed me to let go of an immobilizing working class pride that was cementing a false identity into my psyche, stopping me from transforming.” It was a transformation and reawakening that she would nourish for the rest of her life.

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