london's moving our way

 

A happy discovery that I’ve made recently is that there’s a band - perhaps more of a project - called Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. For bonus points, as well as having the best name ever (runners up: The Strange Death of Liberal England), they’re worth hearing. [Cf ‘The Shitty Beatles’ in Wayne’s World. / Wayne: "Are they any good?" Tiny: "No, they suck." Wayne: "Oh - so not just a clever name."].

So what do they do? Well, if you have any affection for Jean Michel Jarre and/or Vangelis, those master creators of sounds that were the future once (were ubiquitous in movies and TV to connote such, when I was small and neoliberalism brand new; I’m currently a bit obsessed with the album Albedo 0.39 and, in a more kitsch register, Jon and Vangelis’s song I’ll Find My Way Home, which sounds simultaneously on terms with and at an angle to the other synth pop it shared chart space with in January 1982), or for Kraftwerk, or post-rock (big in the 1990s, when a sense of post-ness was all the rage; Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die a favourite listen, then and now) or hauntology (the only music genre whose name’s an homage to a leading French theorist, viz. Jacques Derrida, see Peter Salmon's biography, An Event Perhaps for further details), you should probably give their latest album, The Nation’s Most Central Location (which follows earlier releases, People & Industry | Interim Report: March 1979 and Districts, Roads, Open Space, yep, I’m grooving on what the names convey, in a sort of Boring Postcards sense) a spin.

A side note on hauntology: though I’ve always loved the idea (of invoking a sort haunted postwar lost Eden through sampling and collaging test card music, library music, half-forgotten folkish strains from old children’s TV shows – a soundtrack for the unrealised potentials that culture critic Mark Fisher finds in 1970s and early 1980s British popular culture and writes about in the short pieces collected in k-punk, named for his long-running blog of that name*), I haven’t yet found, having dipped into bands often named as genre exemplars, Boards of Canada et al, any actual tracks did it for me personally (it’d be a dull world if we were all the same).

*Mark Fisher’s intelligent, engagé brand of nostalgia has parallels with that entertained and elaborated by members of the Frankfurt School (e.g. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno | watch this) as described in Stuart Jeffries’ group biography Grand Hotel Abyss – this by way of a 'note to self' to get round to properly reading those guys - a consciously progressive attempt to find unrealised futures in the autobiographical and social ‘deep background’ - and little-to-nothing in common with what we might call proper-binmenism, which threatens to choke like bindweed even the better conversations about social history (whose?) that we can have online. 

*[James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus says: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Janina Fisher, trauma therapist, says, “rather than remembering what happened, once thought to be the goal of trauma treatment, we know how that resolution of the past requires transforming the memories.” She then quotes Bessel van der Kolk: “Thus, in therapy, memory paradoxically becomes an act of creation, rather than the static recording of events."]

A few other recommendations (that I’m making for you so that those algorithms can put their feet up for a change): there’s Public Service Broadcasting, whom I saw at the Glastonbury Festival almost a decade ago now (London Can Take It | We Will Always Need Coal), and also The Observer Effect (aka C.R. plus friends and collaborators coaxing semi-improvised sounds in real time from equipment that looks like Delia Derbyshire might’ve finished with it and given it away to charity shops, plus a prison riot of cabling, no screens in evidence, no laptops, also no internet footprint of any kind except at Middlesex University, bit niche, but if you’re very lucky and wish extra hard you might catch them at one of the New Avalon Ballroom Weekenders at the King Arthurs in Glastonbury, or at Kozfest).