FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Vice Blog

LONDON - 20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS ON BRASSICA AND BELBURY POLY


It's been a few weeks and we still can't get over Brassica's recent digital giallo odyssey "Ballo dei Morti." It's insanely beautiful. Deciding to translate a Slayer song into Italian and allowing a computer to incant the words over a pulsating bed of shimmering synth atmospherics is the kind of crazed inspiration we will always open up our hearts to but the fact that, in this case, as well as being an awesome idea it also happens to work so well is frankly enough to make our swelling hearts explode with happiness. It was enough to make us salivate over fantasies Argento directing a film set in a cavernous cathedral ship orbiting earth, and to go a step further, if such a thing might ever happen, based on the evidence, Brassica would be a more than fitting heir to Goblin's throne. We still stand by all of that.

Advertisement

Brassica - "Ballo dei Morti"

Continuing to spook us in a different but no less effective manner, the haunted analogue world of Belbury Poly recently returned like a creeping mist seeping in under closed doors to entrance us once more. Its queasy, hazed memories of a quintessentially eccentric British past has fermented in the brain as a combination of children's television-inspired nightmares and humdrum reality re-imagined in an exotic, romanticised light, where medieval phantoms dance in the sterile corridors of polytechnic universities overshadowed by ancient monolithic structures on the hillsides above.

The Ghost Box collective have been responsible for creating an intoxicating stream of aural collages dedicated to some eternalist theory that has managed to encapsulate all the odd, funny, eerie things that seem to make so much of Britain's culture spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s seem so alien and strangely appealing to some of us in this day and age. On "From An Ancient Star," Belbury Poly fine tunes what has gone before by instilling a cosmic, BBC Radiophonic disco element into the sound that evokes images of Delia Derbyshire clutching one of her beloved oscillators, surrounded by naked Pan's people all sashaying beneath Cerrone's disco ball on Stonehenge hill. Go to the Ghost Box web site and buy all their stuff. They're special.

Belbury Poly - "From An Ancient Star"

20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS