Echo’s Answer: Broadcast’s Timeless Sound In Hauntology

There’s a lot I need to thank (and blame) one of my friends for, but one thing I’ll keep with me forever is him casually introducing me to Broadcast last June as he was looking for music to lower his stress levels. One hand scrolling through his Apple Music library, the other gripping on a flask filled with a pink alcoholic mixture.

As soon as you hear the music playing, you’d never guess for Broadcast to be first formed in Birmingham during the 90s. The electronic arrangements of the songs mixed with the psychedelic elements reminding us of the 60s are then cut on and off by a – at time overpowering - static white noise creak, while Trish Keenan’s tender voice seems to whisper rather than sing the lyrics as if they were a secret that has to be kept as such. Her tone is calm, never neutral, and at times even surreal. A haze of dreaminess surrounds the band’s sound.

And just like dreams are, Broadcast leaves you feeling like you are in control until you realize you’re  actually not: the rigid, almost robotic pace set by the drum machine or the synths  drags the listener to a liminal space, half retro half futuristic.

Broadcast at their best doesn’t pour out their personal feelings into songs, but rather they craft songs out of the pure fleeting emotions one finds themselves to drown into every once in a while. Feelings so overpowering that nothing else seems to matter more than the psychological plots happening in our brain that alter our perception of reality.

Feelings are fickle and should all be lived as an experience passing by, yet the attachment we’ve build on that specific state binds us to re-create an (obviously) artificial hyperreality where all emotions sediment themselves, obstructing the way for any possibility of concrete change. Attachment works in weird ways, and intense emotional states are hard to get over.

Music like Broadcast easily offers you a similar emotional rush without having to deal with the consequences of them really affecting you post-listen.

THE AVANT-GARDE IS NO GOOD WITHOUT POPULAR, AND POPULAR IS RUBBISH WITHOUT AVANT-GARDE

 Far from the preppy Britpop of the time, Broadcast is an example of hauntology, i.e. a form of music found in the UK where the sound is often reminiscing aesthetics of the past, manipulating elements taken from sci-fi film soundtracks or library music samples, but also folk tunes and real-life field recordings.

Hauntology, which should be considered more as a nuance music can be characterized by rather than a whole genre on its own, creates a sense on nostalgia for dead-ended futures that never happened in the eye of an age (our age) where life keeps on moving, but time has long stopped.

The mourning of lost futures – in the words of Mark Fisher, who first applied this term on music – isn’t for the physical future in terms of chronological events that have yet to happen, but the future in terms of a virtual entity that can no longer happen while still haunting the present.

This postmodernist view derives from the words of Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993), where hauntology is depicted first as a political concept. However, any type of discourse can easily be analyzed under this light as all elements constructing our social identity are in fact intertwined.

ONE FUNCTION OF HAUNTOLOGY IS TO KEEP INSISTING THAT THERE ARE FUTURES BEYOND POSTMODERNITY’S TERMINAL TIME. WHEN THE PRESENT HAS GIVEN UP ON THE FUTURE, WE MUST LISTEN FOR THE RELICS OF THE FUTURE IN THE UNACTIVATED POTENTIALS OF THE PAST.

 Broadcast published a total of seven albums, one of which is a soundtrack for the horror movie Berberian Sound Studio and the other one is a collaboration with The Focus Group,  a musical project by Julian House, most notably known for his album covers for Stereolab, Primal Scream, and also Broadcast. The group eventually disbanded in 2013, a few years after lead singer Trish Keenan died from pneumonia.

What is really great is that their sound remains timeless as it was not a reflection of their environment and their time, but an escape from it.  So, it’ll come as no surprise to find out that during their active years Broadcast never received mass appreciation: their music didn’t try to appeal the vast public, although an album like Tender Buttons did incorporate more accessible catchy tunes.

Here’s a collection of the vast soundscape Broadcast owns.

Their first full length album after a long collection of singles first came out in 2000 under Warp, the label whose still best known for names such as Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Autechre and the newcomers Boards of Canada. Major names in the IDM genre.

You know who to turn to, now everything's changed, come on, let's go
Stop looking for answers in everyone's face, come on, let's go
What's the point in wasting time
On people that you'll never know, come on, let's go

-       Come On Let’s Go, The Noise Made By People (2000)

 Come On Let’s Go is by popular opinion one of the best song by Broadcast coming straight from their debut album. The lyrics easily express the eerie and nostalgic aura of the band, but also the fearful tension overshadowing the word following the Y2K bug. The influences from the sounds of the 60s are not hard to notice.

And chances are, if you’re into Flying Lotus, that you might have heard a sampled version of the last song in the album, Dead Was The Long Year, in Electric Candyman from the 2012 release Until the Quiet Comes, an album highly praised for its take on spiritualism, meditation, and the stages of sleep.

Here in this room, no more a tomb

Thoughts of you conclude without ending

Caution will keep, worries still speak

Fewer the leaves are descending

-       Man Is Not a Bird, HaHa Sound (2003)

 Perhaps one of the most interesting drums you’ll hear thanks to jazz player Neil Bullock, this second track incorporates joy, grief, and triumph.

HaHa Sound is a bizarre encyclopedia of the different influences the band looked at: from obscure cinematic scores such as the Czech cult Valerie And Her Week of Wonders to the art movie Man Is Not a Bird, to music experimentalists such as Basil Kirchin and the Moog fanatic Nino Nardini.

The intricate instrumental arrangements make it Broadcast most playful album, and a fine example of psychedelic music in the new millennium. Even the band said it to be the closest they’ve ever gotten for a release to reflect the initial vision.

Overtime, Broadcast changed its members frequently until only Trish Keenan and James Cargill were left. This shift in the group formation becoming now a duo is noticeable in Tender Buttons (2005), with  most of the sound replaced by machines, the ever-recurring use of analogue synths, and a meek acoustic guitar (rarely used before) accompanying Keegan’s crystalline voice in cut-up lyrics. While still keeping the core of their sound, Broadcast completely reinvented itself getting closer to more minimal post-punk elements.

There’s not a single track in this album that wouldn’t want to listen over and over again. Some being simply catchy and fun, some feeling extremely personal.

The page turns on me and you
Across that white plain
The land is unchanged

-       Tears In the Typing Pool, Tender Buttons (2004)

The bare lyrics of Tears In the Typing Pool and the guitar playing the same chord throughout lull you in accepting defeat, but there’s no anger nor sadness at the end of the process. Everything has to be simply accepted once it becomes factual.

A similar melancholic bittersweetness can be found in You and I in Time. Time wrapping around itself as flowers bloom along with snow covering the landscape. The simplicity of these last two songs is achingly beautiful in its elementarity. However, this release doesn’t lack technical virtuosity either.

Regardless, the only real way to fully appreciate Broadcast is by listening to them whether you’re more interested in their sound production or in simply playing them on your way home. Perhaps they all add up to the same end anyways.

Broadcast doesn’t ask you to listen, they'‘re just there waiting to be discovered by anyone coming across them by chance, which is mostly how this band is found. Either by word of mouth or Spotify link, they’re there waiting with no rush. So if you also wake up feeling uneasy, you know what to type in the search bar. It’s not an antidote, but definitely a release.