Belbury Poly - From An Ancient Star (2009)

You could never accuse the men behind Ghost Box of lacking ambition. Most people start record labels with the aim of signing a few bands, perhaps making some money, maybe gaining a reputation in the music business for their prescience and ability to pick a winner. Jim Jupp and Julian House, on the other hand, seem unconcerned with any of this. Their label began as a humble website flogging burned-to-order CDRs of the music Jupp records as the Belbury Poly and House puts out under the name the Focus Group. Even today, five years on, with their releases so critically acclaimed they have warranted their own genre (the critic Simon Reynolds borrowed the phrase “hauntology” from Jacques Derrida to describe their very British brand of spooky electronica), Ghost Box still eschews conventional distribution channels and publicity. Perhaps Jupp and House have their minds on higher things: their stated intention was to create “not just a record label but an imaginary world”.

Big talk and hyperbole is something to which those who run record labels are prone. The most remarkable thing about Ghost Box is that it genuinely appears to have achieved its goal. Buying one of its releases feels like stepping into another world: like Factory, it seems less interested in developing individual artists than maintaining an overall aesthetic. It makes short films and publishes a periodical, Folklore and Mathematics, the latter replete with fake newspaper articles describing supernatural events, old listings from the Radio Times and quotes from explorer and “psychic researcher” TC Lethbridge. Its CDs come lavishly packaged. Early releases looked like 1970s Pelican paperbacks or school textbooks: the latest, the Belbury Poly’s From an Ancient Star, arrives in a sleeve that recalls the torrent of paperbacks published by Erich von Däniken, the Swiss pseudo-archeologist who spent the 70s informing the world that God was an astronaut. Notice is thus served that their artists are unlikely to sound like Stereophonics.

And so it proves. The music on From an Ancient Star conjures up what David Peace might call an occult history of 70s and early 80s children’s television, the soundtracks of stuff invariably forgotten in who-remembers-the-Wombles? roundups: the station idents of long-lost ITV franchises; Schools and Colleges programmes; the grimy, low-rent British horror films that provided a cheap way of filling time until the Epilogue and attracted an unintended prepubescent audience thanks to the rise in portable bedroom sets; the public information films that suggested a flatly terrifying broken Britain, filled with people who spent their time Fooling With Fireworks, playing Frisbee near power stations and jamming the bare wires of electrical equipment into sockets with matchsticks.

The point doesn’t seem to be nostalgia, with its attendant warm laugh of communal recognition, although there’s a certain kind of obscure telly trainspotter who might delight in noting that the female voices on the Advisory Circle’s Mogadon Coffee Morning are swiped from a 1973 public information film about supermarket pickpockets.

Instead, Ghost Box’s artists deal in eeriness, of varying degrees of subtlety. At its most sumptuous and melodically benign, it’s merely vaguely disquieting, as when the electronics chafe at the folky tune of From an Ancient Star’s Widdershins. Occasionally, it’s genuinely scary: you really don’t want the Focus Group’s Hey Let Loose Your Love, with its mangled hippy folk sample and disembodied electronics, cropping up on your iPod if you’re walking alone late at night. If you’re of a certain age, you might say the music conjures up the sense of creepy otherness that accompanied viewing most of the TV listed above: the weird indulgence of watching Schools and Colleges programmes while sick or skiving from school; the extra layer of terror lent to the goings-on in Death Line or Blood On Satan’s Claw by illicit long-past-your-bedtime viewing on a tiny black and white screen; the way public information films appeared without warning, disrupting ad breaks with death by electrocution or drowning. But you don’t need to have grown up square-eyed in the 70s to find the music Ghost Box release entrancing. Even stripped of their careful packaging and devoid of their arcane pop-cultural connotations, From an Ancient Star  would fulfill Jupp’s intentions, creating a strange, spellbinding imaginary world with music alone: electronica rarely comes as intriguing and atmospheric and laden with weirdly unshakable tunes. - The Guardian

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