We gushed over Brassica’s recent digital giallo odyssey “Ballo dei Morti” a few weeks ago and we still can’t seem to get our heads around how insanely beautiful this song is. Taking the decision to translate a Slayer song into Italian and allowing a computer to incant the words over a pulsating bed of shimmering synth atmospherics is the kind of crazed inspiration we will always open up our hearts too but the fact that, in this case, as well as being an awesome idea it also happens to work so well is frankly enough to make our swelling hearts explode with happiness. Back then we said that this made us salivate over how awesome an old school Argento film set in a cavernous cathedral ship orbiting earth would probably be, and that if such a thing might ever happen, based on the evidence, Brassica would be a more than fitting heir to Goblin’s throne. We still stand by all of that.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Brassica, “Ballo dei Morti”

Continuing to spook us in a different but no less effective manner, the haunted analogue world of Belbury Poly recently returned like a creeping mist that seeps in under closed doors to entrance us once more, with its queasy, hazed memories of a quintessentially eccentric British past that has fermented in the brain as a combination of children’s television-inspired nightmares and humdrum reality re-imagined in an exotic, romanticised light, where medieval phantoms dance in the sterile corridors of polytechnic universities overshadowed by ancient monolithic structures on the hillsides above.

The Ghost Box collective have been responsible for creating an intoxicating stream of aural collages dedicated to some eternalist theory that has managed to encapsulate all the odd, funny, eerie things that seem to make so much of Britain’s culture spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s seem so alien and strangely appealing to some of us in this day and age. On new record “From An Ancient Star”, Belbury Poly fine tunes what has gone before by instilling a cosmic, BBC Radiophonic disco element into the sound that evokes in the mind’s eye images of Delia Derbyshire clutching one of her beloved oscillators, surrounded by naked Pan’s people all sashaying beneath Cerrone’s disco ball on Stonehenge hill. Go to the Ghost Box website and buy all their stuff. They’re special.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Belbury Poly, “From An Ancient Star”

PS: Just to remind anyone who may be in the London area Saturday February 21, our new night at the ICA bar will be commencing, so come down because it’s going to be a good one.