Month: January 2023

The Delaware Road by Alan Gubby

a rare book review but if you like folk horror, hauntology and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop then you need this..

A gripping tale of an alternative timeline where the government performed occult rituals in BBC Basements during World War 2 and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (or rather their equivalent in this timezone) discover the tapes to devastating consequences.

The format is very unique, the story presented as a film script on the left page and illustrated on the right. The design and illustration is outstanding with every page demanding your eyes embrace it yet it never clashes with the film playing in your head, serving as a sort of leader for your imagination.

There’s also plenty of prefaces and appendices as Gubby began by telling this story through multi-media performances including a night in a bunker and an actual festival on an active military base. All this is presented with flyers, event photos and even schematics. Very handy context for those of us who never had a hope in hell of attending.

There’s a lot going on in this story. A central thread being the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and with most central characters being analogous to actual composers who worked at the Workshop, though you don’t need to know anything about the Workshop to enjoy the story [however, if you would like to know more then you should read my book!]. Then you’ve got witch cults, haunted electronics, cursed recordings and soundwaves as a means to revolution with some sex and violence thrown in too (not at the same time). 

All that draws a Venn diagram of pertinent themes with ‘The Delaware Road’ right in that perfect sweet spot at the center. It would make one hell of a movie, for sure, but it also works great in this format. I practically inhaled it, only stopping to read due to the demands of work and life. 

My copy even came stunningly wrapped in printed paper with art prints and postcards and radiation pills. The strong visual aspects echoing the multi-media origins of the tale. Once you’ve consumed the story, the book’s stunning visual aesthetics means you’ll still not be letting it go and enjoying a flick through the art many a time. I suspect I’ll be lured back in to reading it all again by that art in the none too distant future.

I mostly buy ebooks these days due to space constraints but this was one I had to have a physical copy of on my shelf and if you’re the sort of person who reads this website, I suspect you need one too.

Laibach – Love Is Still Alive

We tuck into another wonderfully bewildering Laibach release

I’ve been following Laibach now for thirty years and somehow I keep on being surprised. It’s as inevitable as death and taxes now. Nothing could have prepared me for the song “Love Is Still Alive”. It’s a beautiful country pop song that makes me laugh and beam from ear to ear.

The song describes how the earth has been destroyed but love is still alive as the narrator and his beloved ride a rocket through the Universe in search of a new home.

It perhaps makes more sense given its original context in the soundtrack to the film “Iron Sky 2” (still not seen it but the original was a hoot) but still comes as a massive bolt from the blue and a devastatingly accurate one too. As for the video, well, I don’t normally post promotional videos in the middle of reviews but I feel like pausing a moment to flag this work of art

Of course the humble medium of ‘promotional video’ has always transcended its original purpose in the hands of Laibach, a multidisciplinary collective.

As does the concept of an ‘EP of versions’. Looking at the track list you could be forgiven for thinking this is a load of remixes or alternative mixes/takes but this being Laibach its nothing so simple.

What you’re actually getting are variations on a theme, radical rearrangements of the song taking it through disco, ambient, pop, Joe Meek, dub, Vega/Rev and club music. When there are vocals, they’re often different versions.

To befuddle the listener even further, these versions often segue into one another creating the effect of “Love Is Still Alive” as being one huge, epic, far-reaching suite of sound.

If Laibach had never existed and you wrote a fictional book that matched their real-life story, you’d be panned for writing something so far fetched and unrealistic. “Love Is Still Alive” is the latest outrageous chapter and it sounds fantastic.

Old Million Eye – Live at Beauty Supply

I love the idea of January 1st releases. I woke up to a new year and three essential new albums ready to download on Bandcamp. This one really raised my eyebrows as I’ve listened to a lot of Old Million Eye these last two years but never seen them live or heard a live recording before.

As I suspected, it’s a whole new angle on the project. There’s still that whole psychedelic drone meets deconstructed sing thing that I associate with the project but instead of the multi-layered sound voids, it’s totally stripped down. There’s clearly no backing tapes just a man, his tools and his creativity let loose on a very lucky audience.

Whats impressive to me is I can hear what sounds like an audience, the shuffle of feet and the snap of a ringpull but I dont hear any yapping. Which is how it should be. This might sound like an odd thing to say about a live album but this is really one to listen to on headphones (unless you happen to have a high quality P.A. system at home) so you can absorb all the details and ambience.

I always thought of Old Million Eye as being such a studio thing but now it’s on the record that this extraordinary sonic alchemy can be caught in the wild and on the strength of this album, I’m putting that on my bucket list.