Great Ghosts

Halloween, with all its candy and kiddie costumes, makes light of a
pretty serious aspect of the human condition: Ghosts are real. Maybe
not in the form of ectoplasmic slimers or furniture-flinging
poltergeists, but at least as a metaphorical means of explaining the
memories we hold on to long after a person or thing or even a
possibility is dead and gone. Who hasn’t been haunted by such phantoms?
There are plenty of places you can spend your Halloween this year, but
if you want to hear some truly haunted music, there’s only one show to
see: Atlas Sound and Broadcast.

Atlas Sound is the solo recording guise of prolific Deerhunter
frontman Bradford Cox. Broadcast are the Birmingham, UK, duo of Trish
Keenan and James Cargill. Both bands engage in what music critic Simon
Reynolds, borrowing from Jacques Derrida, has dubbed “hauntology”:
music that explores “the paradoxical state of the spectre, which is
neither being nor non-being.” In general, this means lots of
disembodied voices, echoes, blurry samples and hazes of sound, and a
kind of sinister nostalgia or longing. But each of these acts takes a
slightly different approach to busting out its ghosts.

For starters, Broadcast’s latest album has an almost parodically
hauntological title, Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate
Witch Cults of the Radio Age, which suggests echoes of the
supernatural suspended neither in this world nor beyond but as radio
waves of sound. Furthermore, Broadcast collaborator the Focus Group is
an alias of musician/designer Julian House, whose Ghost Box label may
have single-handedly inspired Reynolds’s recoinage of Derrida in the
first place.

Then there is the collaboration’s sound, a refinement of Broadcast’s
heavy-lidded, vintage psychedelic pop, explored in 23 tracks
prismatically fragmented across 48 minutes. The songs aren’t scary, but
they are slightly creepy, like nursery rhymes recited ominously out of
context or the faded but color-saturated film stock of some old Italo
horror flick.

“A Seancing Song” may be the album’s single best example of all
this, both in its literal title and its composition. It begins with an
eerie singsong rhyme, almost a cappella except for what sounds like a
harpsichord being played as a wind chime or warped as if on an old
record. Then there’s an audible tape pop, and then the sound effects
kick in: a door rattling against a lock, an old-timey telephone
ringing, a wave of radio static and tinny, transmitted voice.
Throughout the album, the tones, vocal treatments, and ambient touches
chosen by the group give things a decidedly dated and spectral feel.
It’s all aesthetically pleasant, but just a little unsettling.

Whereas Broadcast and the Focus Group evoke a kind of mass cultural
memory via the institutional sounds of the ’70s, Atlas Sound’s Cox is
more concerned with unearthing shades of his own individual past. In
this regard, Atlas Sound, with its gently layered, bedroom-recorded
acoustics and hazy washes of sound, could almost be a progenitor of the
more recently (and dubiously) named “chillwave” or “hypnagogic pop,”
with its emphasis on fond, faintly remembered nostalgia. While that
stuff revels in some soft and fuzzy idealized childhood, Cox reaches
back and finds his own past clouded by real darkness (his last album
recalled a summer spent in hospital beds at age 16 on account of his
disfiguring Marfan syndrome; Deerhunter’s first album was recorded
following the death of the band’s original bassist). The effect is not
so much “chill” as chilling—a dissonance between his delicately
beautiful compositions and sometimes disturbing subject matter that is
utterly compelling.

Cox has spoken of Atlas Sound’s new album, Logos, as being
less introspective, but certain themes understandably seem to follow
him. (The album cover features Cox, nude and gaunt, with a white flare
of light where his face should be, and it’s both personally revealing
and neatly illustrative of that idea of “neither being nor
non-being.”)

On “Walkabout,” a duet with Noah Lennox of (culpable “chillwave”
paterfamilias) Panda Bear/Animal Collective, someone asks, over a
playful drum-machine beat and a merry-go-round organ loop (sampled from
the Dovers’ “What Am I Going to Do”), “What did you want to see/What
did you want to be/When you grew up” and answers, “To go away and not
look back… in looking back you may go blind.” It’s a hopeful-sounding
song, strangely nostalgic yet wary/weary of nostalgia at the same
time—the past is present and yet not present. (To connect some
dots—and loops—Logos‘s other duet features
Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab, many of whose album covers were designed
by the Focus Group’s House.)

The strummy, oddly upbeat opening verse of “Shelia” ends with the
promise “And when we die, we’ll bury ourselves,” before turning into
the slow, pleading chorus “‘Cause no one wants to die alone.” On the
album’s title track, over a propulsive, shaky backbeat and some gauzy,
bent keys, Cox mumbles, and you can just make out the words “your
ghost” and then a line about “spirits floating in the night” and maybe
“find[ing] their way.”

There may be no rivers of pink slime or Patrick Swayzes helping you
throw pottery at this concert, but it will be teeming with ghosts both
in sound and in spirit. I ain’t afraid.