Analysing A Ghost By Electronic Means

This one is a little more niche than what I would normally cover and given its very specific theme, it’s probably already known by a lot of its potential audience (especially as I’m late to the party). But as I’m only just now learning of its existence, I’ll assume there are others among us who are also still in need of the good word.

2022 saw the 50th anniversary of Nigel Kneale's classic BBC Supernatural thriller The Stone Tape, an occasion that prompted Hidden Britain to approach a group of the UK's leading wyrd electronic artists and commission a new series of works in tribute, leading to the release of Analysing A Ghost By Electronic Means in 2023.

Inevitably with a project like this there will be some disparity about what the actual brief is, but I’d say that 80-90% of this fits together seamlessly which is pretty remarkable given the number of busy minds involved. Those with more diverse tastes than myself may find the hit rate even higher for them.

With artists associated with labels previously championed here such as Clay Pipe Recordings, Wayside & Woodland and Castles in Space, it's no surprise that this is the success that it is. A well balanced mix of more melodic themes and dark ambient incidentals, there's very little here that would have sounded out of place on the original broadcast. 

Particular kudos to The Night Monitor - It's In The Computer would be right at home in an early seventies episode of Doctor Who, as well as to the always excellent Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan who can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned.

Stream / download here: 

The New Eves - The New Eve Is Rising

Brighton folk-punk quartet the New Eves drag the folk tradition kicking and screaming into the 21st century on their superb debut LP. It’s a true Esoteric Britannia statement with their deeply ingrained and quietly terrifying Albion roots merging effortlessly with the anarchic post-punk of the Slits and the Aupairs, the hypnotic rhythmic grooves of Can, and droning strings ala Velvet Underground era John Cale. For a start.

It’s a truly visceral experience, and reaches Comus like levels of intensity at times.

Check out their wonderfully unhinged modernisation and deconstruction of the Alfred Noyes narrative poem The Highwayman, previously put to music by Phil Ochs for a primer. Poor old Phil would not cope.

Great stuff and would potentially have been my album of the year last year, had I known of it then. 

Bressa Creeting Cake

I've been revisiting this old favourite of late and thought I'd share it here as its largely unknown outside of New Zealand, and to be fair they're far from a household name even here in their homeland. 

Their self titled (and only) album is - in this writer's opinion - the best Flying Nun album of the nineties.

It's a beautiful, off-kilter pop record which boasts more memorable choruses than most bands would manage in a career, but sadly they were too weird and individualistic to make an impression on the general public and are now a bit of a cult favourite, with a small but rabidly loyal fanbase.

A vinyl reissue a few years back appended the rest of their recorded output (EP tracks and tribute album appearances) and this is what you'll find if you care to investigate them on Spotify or Bandcamp. And I urge you to do so if you're looking for something strange and beautiful that you can obsess over for a lifetime. You won't regret it.

Spooky Eyes - S/T

This Tasmania three-piece's debut is a great old fashioned psychedelic power trio album that doesn't sound a day over 1970 and is seriously deserving of a Keef cover.

I bet guitarist / vocalist Jude Hastings has a great record collection. He's clearly a scholar of the era when proto-heavy metal was still heavily blues based, with a strong Tony Iommi influence to his lead guitar work which would sound right at home on Sabbath's debut. The rhythm section of Piper Rayner and Jaxon Bassett are pitch perfect for this material too.

Their originals are full of memorable, energetic riffs and are so well constructed that the only nit I can pick with this is that their mid-album cover of the Count Five's Psychotic Reaction comes across as an unnecessary distraction from the excellence of their own material.

A top album that will fit nicely between the May Blitz and Sir Lord Baltimore LPs on your shelf. 

Takeshi Terauchi - Eleki Bushi 1966-1974

Japan in the sixties was surf guitar mad, enough so to spawn its own sub-genre, Eleki. Upon their first tour of Japan the Ventures became superstars, and soon enough the Eleki Bumu was in full swing, fusing the Venture's surf guitars with the melodies and sometimes instrumentation of traditional Japanese folk music. 

Takeshi Terauchi's mother was a music teacher who played the traditonal Japanese stringed instrument the shamisen, the strings of which are typically played with a more vigorous staccato attack than those on a guitar. Terauchi himself took up the guitar at the age of five and applying his mother's shamisen technique to his own guitar playing he was well on the road to becoming Eleki's undisputed master with his distinctive style. His style would evolve considerably over the years, often incorporating elements of heavy psychedelia.

This post is intended to serve two purposes. Firstly to draw your attention specifically to this excellent 2023 collection of Terauchi's work issued by French label 180 g. It's a fine companion piece to the more expansive Big Beat Records Nippon Guitars collection which helped introduce Terauchi to a wider Western audience in 2011 and there's not much material doubled up between the two so you should own both.

Secondly, although Nippon Guitars was a revelatory release at the time, Terauchi's back catalogue otherwise remained elusive beyond Youtube streams and torrented vinyl rips. Fortunately this is no longer the case with 180 g following up Eleshi Bushi in 2025 with reissues of six of his most well regarded albums from the sixties and early seventies which can all be had in full through their Bandcamp page here.

Dig in, it really is a treasure trove of inspirational guitar music.

Sun Dial - Overspill Sessions

Sun Dial's archives have been getting a pretty thorough combing through over the last few years and I'm all for it. 

Firstly I'm operating on the assumption that you, dear reader, are familiar with the band. If not, you need to be listening to their classic 1990 debut Other Way Out right now. Set that going and head back here. 

During this era the band had a great thing going with vintage Beatlesque UK psychedelic songcraft filtered through a spectrum of heavy Hawkwind meets Stooges space rock. They released two albums and a series of EPs in this style before pivoting to a more contemporary shoegaze sound with 1992's Reflecter.

Overspill Sessions is the latest in their archival release series and dating from 1991, falls smack bang right in the middle of my favourite era for the band. Coming from the same productive sessions that were responsible for the original Overspill EP and the Return Journey album (confusingly released after Reflecter), Overspill Sessions is both a great look at how the material evolved in the studio and an excellent album in its own right. 

Looking at the track list you'll see a few familiar names if you know those original releases, but you'll find that here they're either substantially different performances or presented in new mixes that serve the material extremely well. There are also several songs that I believe have never been released before (Let It Go and Black Light) and they're very worthy additions to the Sun Dial canon. And the covers from these sessions (It's All Too Much and Interstellar Overdrive) could almost serve as a manifesto for the band during this era.

Highly recommended listening and if you fancy digging deeper into this era I'd also recommend the archival releases of Other Way In (outtakes from Other Way Out),  Never Fade: A Collection Of EP's 1990-1992, and Rays Of The Sun - Demos 1991-1992 all of which are superb.

Abronia - Shapes Unravel

This six-piece Portland band are making some of the most impressive tribal psychedelic rock I've heard in recent years. Their 2022 release Map of Dawn grabbed me on first listen, but their new album Shapes Unravel is exponentially better in every regard.

Shapes Unravel really does sounds epic. Abronia are unusually diverse musically, stretching beyond the normal palette of instrumentation you'd expect to find on a psychedelic rock record, facilitating the sort of world building that you just can't achieve with the standard guitar / bass / drums set up. 

Pedal steel guitarist Rick Pedrosa is used superbly here, crafting wide open vistas that really help to give these tunes a sense of enormous scale. And vocalist Keelin Myer is a force of nature. Kosmische spaghetti western - who knew that was a thing?

Don't sleep on this one. Check it out below:

Candidate - Avellenau (Songs from The Wicker Man)

The return of Candidate has been one of the most welcome occurrences of recent years and while Point Clear, their first album of original tunes since 2007 is reassuringly superb, it's another release we'll turn our attention to here.

I've written before of my love for their album Nuada, an alternative soundtrack to the classic folk-horror film the Wicker Man featuring their own compositions and steeped in atmosphere provided by visiting the original filming locations (and even staying in the hotel featured in the film).

Avellenau is a welcome extension of Nuada, featuring Candidate's interpretations of four of the films most important songs. There's really no need for me to write anymore here. You know the songs. You know the band. You know they belong together.

Sadly, I discovered the existence of this EP too late to secure a physical copy of the very limited CD (dammit!) but it's all here to be streamed or downloaded from Bandcamp:

Simon Crocket - Predecimal

There's nothing I like better than some cosy and unashamedly vintage synth and Simon Crocket's Predecimal is one of the best albums of this type that I've heard in a long time. 

While these sorts of releases can sometimes focus a little too much on ambience and atmosphere at the expense of composition, Predicimal is perfectly balanced. Crocket's attention to period detail is admirably deployed here, but first and foremost this is a varied and memorable set of melodies. Think of the more concise efforts from the early eighties Tangerine Dream catalogue and you're roughly on the right track.

Opener Half Penny is an early highlight, a theme tune in search of its own pseudoscience documentary, but best of all is the duo of Crown and Thrupence which delightfully reimagine the IPCRESS file as space-age pop.

This is the ninth (!) album in his yellow and black series and if the others are even a patch on this, I've got some good listening ahead of me as I work my way backwards. Hooray!

The Owl Service - A Tribute to Sandy Denny (Expanded Edition)

The Owl Service's sizeable discography has had a fair bit of tinkering with over the last few years, with an intimidating number of releases (both new and archival) available on Bandcamp and Spotify. The good news is you can pretty much wade in anywhere and be rewarded for doing so, such is the consistency of their output.

This arrived in my mailbox a few days ago and it's as good a place to start as any for a novice. 

Originally released as a 2 track 7" by the Fruits de Mer label this expanded 6 track CDr and digital edition is uniformly excellent.

Dorothy Chappell has the unenviable task of tackling Sandy's vocals on these tracks (with the help of Mellow Candle's Alison O'Donnell on Genesis Hall) and appears undaunted by the task. And Steven Collins arrangements are - as usual - sympathetic and always in service to the song. 

Highlights are many, best exemplified by the full band arrangement of soundtrack rarity Here In Silence which to me betters the original, accentuating the bleakness of the lyric in ways the original could only hint at.