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It’s become a tradition here to post a playlist for Halloween so here’s the one for this year, a collection of favourite “voodoo” music. Most are these pieces have as much to do with real voodoo as Bewitched does with real witchcraft but I like the atmospheres of Voodoo Exotica they evoke.
Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi [...]

The HAL Project.
January flew by in a blizzard of work so posting here tended to rely more on pictures than words. As usual the things I’ve been designing will be unveiled when they’re closer to being published or released but for now here’s some new or not-so-new items worthy of note.
• The HAL Project screensaver. [...]

Suspiria: Jessica Harper and a bird with crystal plumage.
For this year’s Halloween playlist I’ve let Mark Pilkington from Strange Attractor make the selection. The following is from a CD-R collection of Italian horror soundtracks that Mark sent me some time ago. Not everything here is easy to find but the superbly nerve-jangling racket created [...]

Light play on the river Thame by net_efekt.
…the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities.
The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the latter sometimes [...]

One of the great electroacoustic compilations, Electronic Music III: Berio/Druckman/Mimaroglu, Turnabout Records (1967).
I’ve spent the past week or so immersed in the world of electroacoustic composition courtesy of torrents provided by the Avant Garde Project. Wikipedia attempts a definition of electroacoustic music and thus saves me the trouble:
While all electroacoustic music is made with [...]

The (Electric Seance) concept was inspired by the discovery that many early pioneers and inventors of electrical apparatus and radiophonic equipment believed that they could use their inventions to contact ‘the other side’.
Scott Johnston
This month’s issue of The Wire has Birmingham group Pram on the cover. Inside they discuss working with filmmaker Scott Johnston whose [...]

A follow-up to last year’s list. Seeing as Joy Division are very much in the news at the moment with the release of Control and the re-issue of the albums, I thought a post-punk theme would be appropriate. The period which immediately followed punk in the late Seventies saw a lot of doom being imported [...]

Many sounds have never been heard—by humans: some sound waves you don’t hear—but they reach you. “Storm-stereo” techniques combine singers, instrumentalists and complex electronic sound. The emotional intensity is at a maximum. Sleeve note for An Electric Storm, Island Records, 1969.
An Electric Storm by White Noise is reissued in a remastered edition this week. [...]

Xeni Jardin and Boing Boing readers reminisce today about the childhood traumas inspired by Sesame Street characters. Wimps, say I, although in fairness I was too old to be frightened of Muppetry by the time that stuff appeared on British TV screens.
Scariest thing in the Coulthart household, easily out-classing anything on children’s television (Doctor Who [...]

Séance, 2001 version.
Drew Mulholland, aka Mount Vernon Arts Lab (also Mount Vernon Astral Temple and Black Noise…), has joined forces recently with the masterful Ghost Box collective, purveyors of finely-crafted and frequently creepy electronica. MVAL’s 2001 release, The Séance at Hobs Lane, is now Ghost Box release no. 9 and comes repackaged in their [...]

Do Wah Nanny by Exuma (Kama Sutra LP, 1971).
I came down on a lightning bolt
Nine months in my Mama’s belly.
When I was born, the midwife scream and shout,
I had fire crystals coming out of my mouth.
I’m Exuma, I’m the Obeah Man!

So you’ve listened to Dr John’s Gris-Gris over and over and become addicted to its [...]

Well…new for us. Glo Spot Records have reissued Psyche-Delia’s scarce KPM album, Electrosonic (1972), in an edition that will quickly become as scarce itself: 500 copies on green vinyl.
Order it (or hear clips) from Boomkat.
The great BBC documentary about the Radiophonic Workshop, Alchemists of Sound, can now be found on YouTube. Lots of archive footage [...]

Der Tod als Erwürger (1851) by Alfred Rethel.
It’s a fact (sad or otherwise) that a substantial percentage of my music collection would make good Halloween listening but in that percentage a number of works are prominent as spooky favourites. So here’s another list to add to those already clogging the world’s servers, in no [...]

Q: What do you get when you cross analogue synthesizers, samples from obscure public information films, the graphic design of Pelican Books, Arthur Machen, HP Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, CS Lewis, Hammer horror, the Wicker Man and the music from Oliver Postgate’s animated films for children?
A: the CD releases by artists on the Ghost Box label. [...]