WOEBOT

HEY LET LOOSE YOUR LOVE
THE FOCUS GROUP
GHOSTBOX.CO.UK

You hurriedly park your Morris Minor Traveller outside your pebbledash bungalow and tear into the lounge bedecked in brown acrylic, decorated in equal parts Tretchikoff and Vaserely prints, feverishly removing the sleeve from the new Focus Group LP, carefully lowering the twelve inches of static crackling plastic onto your formica-clad entertainment centre. Its creator, celebrated sleeve designer Julian House (Stereolab, Broadcast, Primal Scream), is an exacting collector of the tainted British parochial. Obsessed by the twilight world of Diana Dors, Donald Cammel, Joe Meek and Delia Derbyshire, House crafts both exquisite visual collages in thrall with European Modernism (the moiré effects from the covers of Penguin books, Lettrism and Polish Movie Posters) and divinely wrought soundscapes which hark back to an eternal past.

The nineteen instrumentals on “Hey Let Loose Your Love” are so heavily woven that the fabric that holds them together threatens to crumble. Detail isn’t oppressive in the least, merely destabilisingly delicate. Songs are like lopsided Victorian automata, instruments mismatch in incongruent tempos (one of House’s stock sources are Library records in which instrumental parts for songs are separated individually, tracks he proceeds to elliptically reconstruct) and frequently sequences crumble into soft-edged bliss before one’s ears. It is almost as if the very action of their exposure is the agent of their collapse. Even stranger still, though plainly audible, occasionally the music seems to disappear from earshot, becoming proverbially invisible, sinking into the netherworld of the unconscious. Certain recurrent themes seem to serve as mnemonics luring the listener’s attention to the surface.

Pieced together from the mustiest samples, Children’s exercise records, vintage BBC Drama, clunky Brit-Jazz and (most pertinently) Library Records, this is an archaeology of emotion, a philosophically-motivated exploration of the power not just one’s childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. Memory in work of The Focus Group and House’s partners Belbury Poly and Eric Zann at ghostbox.co.uk (where the collective’s entire output is available) is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics.