I suppose it makes sense that as the whole Ghostbox thing starts to get a little long in the tooth, the label should begin to expand its aesthetic remit slightly, welcoming in a slightly younger generation on music-makers for whom newly-excavated shadows of the ‘80s form the primary source material, as the hallowed ‘70s fall deeper into the semi-remembered past. Hence: Martin Jenkins, whose work here thankfully rises above his somewhat twee recording moniker, building a familiarly Ghostbox-y nest of retro-spook comforts from… well, you can guess where he’s going be going with this, right?

Yes, cry out in delight or bury your head in your hands as you will, but I’m afraid he’s going to John Carpenter town, and there’s nothing you can do about it. As my Umberto review in the last post will have hopefully made clear, my own reaction to such things is still very much in the former category, so I’m good. To reduce ‘Sleep Games’ to the horribly reductive, “in-a-nutshell” style summary it seems to be crying out for, what’s essentially going on here is Carpenter/Howarth synth action put through a Boards of Canada filter. Obviously there’s more to be pulled out of it should you wish, but basically if that sounds like your idea of a fun time, you’ll probably enjoy it, and if not, well, never mind.

And so things progress exactly the way you might expect: simple, hard-hitting synth lines in the foreground, gradually contaminated and warped by that oh-so-familiar brand of comforting, ordered unease, seeding the clean, sharp angles of the neon & PVC riffs with mossy, overgrown beds of artfully corroded electronic texture, sounds that seem to have been planted by some benevolent library music father way back in the mists of time and left to breed and spread within the depths of some forgotten room-sized analogue instrument… ready for when an ambitious horror movie director finally powers it up again and sits at the keyboard to kick some minimalist ass.

Like those old Boards of Canada records, it’s hard to put your finger on Precisely what it is that makes Pye Corner Audio so compelling – there’s a kind of oblique, impersonal quality to the music, a recognition of the fact that he/they isn’t really doing anything that wouldn’t be wholly expected, given the place and time from which he is broadcasting, and yet, for whatever reason, it works, where so many other contenders breakdown, mired in cheese.

Several track titles (‘The Mirrorball Cracked’, ‘Underneath the Dancefloor’) seem to invoke the kind of ‘curdled rave nostalgia’ / haunted dancefloor aesthetic that so many electronic artists have hooked onto in recent years, but in actuality ‘Sleep Games’ bears very little resemblance to any kind of music people ever danced to – it’s lineage is lonely, bedroom-dwelling electro through and through, with even the zombified Detroit techno of ‘Into The Maze’ coming to us via several brick walls at the very least. The Precinct 13 pulse of ‘The Mirror Ball Cracked’ is unmistakable, with only distant, disembodied groans serving to remind us of the time & intent separating Jenkins from his master, whilst ‘The Black Mill Video Tape’ leads us on precisely the kind of Stone Tape-style ghost hunt the title would suggest, perhaps relocated to some mid-80s LA backlot zone, perhaps overseen by…. yes – ‘Prince of Darkness’! You’re one step ahead of me! And we could play this game throughout the album’s fifty minute duration, right until the distant sirens and ominous synth oboe on ‘Chlorine’ take us outside the city, closing on the more familiarly pastoral Ghostbox stylings of ‘Nature Reclaims The Town’.

Now that Ghostbox have caught up with the era of VHS and Snake Plisskin, who knows what delights await as the reconfigured nostalgia wagon rumbles on? Things are moving quickly, as advance guards in the states are already plundering the most lamentable forgotten corners of the ‘90s for inspiration, and a pertinent question for a few years down the line might be: what the hell do we do when it catches up with now?

Labels: best of 2012, Goat, Lantern, Peaking Lights, Pye Corner Audio, The Caretaker