Back to fragility: Broadcast 2010 at Sónar Galicia in A Coruña.
Photo: wikimedia/Alberto Garcia
The music of Birmingham-based Broadcast has always flown somewhat under the radar in the electronica universe of the British label Warp label. There was a very successful album that was widely received in 1997, “The Noise Made by People”. Afterwards, the band around singer Trish Keenan, who died of pneumonia in 2011, continued to refine their sound cosmos down to the last details. Soundscapes and sound experiments increasingly replaced the classic song format.
The basic coordinates always remained the same: Broadcast, very similar to Stereolab, drew on various hipster universes of the 60s and amalgamated Sixties pop and psychedelia with the early connections of electronica and pop. Trish Keenan’s singing was also based on the psychedelic band The United States of America, who were one of the first to incorporate strange synthesizer sounds and other electronic sound generators into their already weird pop songs. Along with the already mentioned Stereolab, Broadcast are a prime example of the postmodern quote pop of the 90s.
The music became increasingly flat, culminating in the posthumous soundtrack to Peter Strickland’s film “The Berberian Sound Studio” in 2013, which reconstructed the sound production of a 1960s horror film and offered a playground for the band’s experimental side. The now released demos from the years 2000 to 2009, which were compiled from the archived 4-track cassettes and mini discs from Trish Keenan’s archive, sound all the more surprising.
On the two albums “Spell Blanket” and “Distant Call” you can hear spartan song sketches, the opulence and excessiveness of the albums has been crossed out. Instead, in their demos, Broadcast have cultivated a lo-fi aesthetic that is very touching in its fragility and is much more than “The Song Before the Songs Comes Out,” as the opener of “Spell Blanket” announces.
A few of the most beautiful songs that Broadcast have brought into the world are hidden on the six record sides. For example, “March of the Fleas”, a piece of dream pop that lasts just two minutes, which today, in its reverberation and fraying (and with a tender tap on the distortion pedal), seems like a bubblegum variant of Grouper’s later ambient experiments. Or the folk song “Tears in the Typing Pool”, which can originally be found on the album “Tender Buttons” from 2005 and which is completely transformed into a brittle piece of anti-folk in the demo version.
“Distant Call” and “Spell Blanket” bring together a total of 50 pieces that, as a whole, reveal a sound that was always present underground in the broadcast universe, but remained partially hidden by the mass of sounds and references: more porous, every gesture of strength negating bedroom pop.
Broadcast: »Distant Call – Collected Demos 2000–2006« (Warp Records)
Broadcast: »Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006–2009« (Warp Records)
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