SL04 Ghostwriter The Continuing Adventures Of The Strange Sound Association
TRACKLISTING:
Music For Men Of Letters
• A Man’s Head (Waltz For George
Simenon)
• The Recidivist (Theme For
Imagined Simenon Story)
• Man On Wire (Ivor Gurney’s Noise)
• (Colin Wilson Says) Like Brandy
On A Cold Night
• Dream Road Trip With Dustbowl
Philosopher (Music For John Steinbeck)
• The Life Behind The Life
(Fragments for John Cowper Powys)
• Spirit Photography (Invoking
Arthur Conan Doyle)
Music For Imagined Technologies
• The Anglo-French Music Machine
• Avian Battery Machine
• Via The Cavity Magnetron
• Even Solemnity In The
Instruments (Farina’s Automatic Translation Machine)
Music For Flotsam and Jetsam
• Two Tides Meet
• Last Strange Voyage (Lament For
Donald)
• Imagined South Coast Boarding
House (in Which Sits David Jones)
• Another Favourite Beach
“We all create a mythological world of
our own out of certain shapeless materials.”
(John Cowper Powys)
Ghostwriter is the fascinating
project of Devon-based Mark Brend;
musician, author and respected expert on antiquarian sound apparatus
(you may well know his book, Strange
Sounds: Offbeat Instruments and Sonic Experiments in Pop – the
definitive text on the subject). The Continuing
Adventures Of The Strange Sound Association is his first
longplayer under the Ghostwriter moniker. It is an album like no other.
Partially based upon archive voice recordings, fragmentary texts and
‘imagined works’ by literary figures eminent (Arthur Conan Doyle, John
Steibeck), cult (Colin Wilson, John Cowper Powys) and arcane (Arthur
Machen, Ivor Gurney), The Continuing
Adventures… weaves ethereal atmosphere, wistful song and
playful soundscape from a battery of instruments and sound sources,
including dulcitone, persephone, harpsichord, autoharp, toy piano,
modular synthesizer, recorder, banjo, accordion, bass, drums, sampler,
miscellaneous voices and something called the brendonium.
Divided into three distinct ‘Chapters’: Music For Men Of
Letters, Music For Imagined Technologies and Music For Flotsam and
Jetsam, these mysteriously beguiling compositions run the gamut
from frisky, jazz-flavoured vignettes to garden shed electronica and
contemplative sound collages via Wicker
Man folk and bygone soundtrack esoterica. Beyond easy
categorisation, this is music informed as much by the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop and the British Sound Archive as it is various currents in
leftfield pop, electronica, folk and plunderphonics.
Brend is assisted in his endeavours by a number of additional musicians
and collaborators, including multi-instrumentalists Tim Conway and Matt
Gale (Farina), singer Suzy Mangion (Piano Magic, George) and analogue
synth collector Darren Hayman (Hefner), among several others. Ghostwriter’s debut album is very
much a product of Brend’s own unique imagination and compositional
vision, however.
As with all Second
Language releases, this album is not only a collectable,
intimately hand-crafted limited edition but also comes complete with a
range of commodious inserts (Ghostwriter library ticket, miniature
book, embossed code envelope with unique typed message, etc).
For further information on Ghostwriter : http://www.myspace.com/ghostwriteruk
200 copies only - SOLD OUT
.