Ghost Box Records

The Haunted Generation is also a regular column in Fortean Times magazine, rounding up new releases and forthcoming events. From Issue 456, dated April 2025…

THE HAUNTED GENERATION

Bob Fischer rounds up the latest news from the parallel worlds of popular hauntology

“All Moon Wiring Club albums revolve around a central concept,” explains Ian Hodgson. “Cats, gonks, or conspiracies within a Tudor Manor House. I’d had a vague ‘horse concept’ in mind for about fifteen years, without ever managing to pin it down. But then, while I was working on these tracks, I started to envisage dried-up, baking hot riverbed trails with spectral horse riders whispering around them. And dusty ghost towns with invisible, meandering clip-clop pathways…”

For almost two decades, Ian has been creating synaesthetic soundscapes in his guise as Moon Wiring Club, and his windswept new record Horses in Our Blood is indeed, as he pragmatically puts it, “the MWC Horse Album”. Drifting between its funk-fuelled beats are Morricone-esque flutes and arid, fly-blown slabs of ambience, all created – as with the bulk of his thirty-odd albums – using the software of his trusty Playstation 2. “There is a narrative that wends its way through,” says Ian. “But it drifts away from clarification on the wheezy breeze and becomes apparent only when you’re nodding off”.

Those unfamiliar with Ian’s work have an expansive parallel universe of music and art to explore. Horses in Our Blood comes swathed in haunting watercolours by Clinkskell-based painter Algernon Aldridge, whose work – Ian insists – is still under-appreciated thirteen years after his death from spontaneous human combustion. Giddy up to www.moonwiringclub.com.

Meanwhile, despite growing up in the Italian city of Palermo, Alessio Bosco has somehow crafted an album that captures perfectly the drizzly ennui of watching the BBC2 Test Card with a nasty dose of the mumps. Recorded under the name 30 Door Key, Alessio’s album A Warning to the Curious is a selection of melodic instrumentals, with the likes of ‘Edda’s Dream’ and ‘Old Ones’ adding hints of Folk Horror that will delight fans of early Ghost Box Records. Dig it up from subexoticrecords.bandcamp.com. And speaking of Ghost Box, the label’s ongoing reissue campaign has reached the extraordinary Mount Vernon Arts Lab album, The Séance at Hobs Lane. Recorded in 2001 by Glaswegian tape-mangler Drew Mulholland and his friends, it was originally released by Ghost Box in 2007 before drifting inexorably into the ether. Summoned once more to the table, it’s a movement-defining combination of fizzly electronics and austere Victoriana. Is there anybody there? Head to ghostbox.co.uk and tap once for yes.

As new genres go, “funereal cat folk” is at the more esoteric end of the scale, but that’s how Isle of Lewis resident Ali Murray describes his bizarre new album Catmandu. It is, essentially, a collection of folk ballads performed entirely by cats. Or, more accurately, by Ali himself singing “miaow miaow miaow” all the way through every single song. As the man himself laconically notes, it’s “not for everyone”, and dog-owners in particular might be well advised to issue a trigger warning before playing it in the vicinity of unsuspecting pooches. But it is delightfully strange, purring away at felinesofthenight.bandcamp.com. It should, however, probably be kept well away from A Colloquy of Birds. This charming album about the folklore of ornithology is performed by the resolutely human voices of Alison O’Donnell and Gayle Brogan, and can be found hopping around the branches of sonidopolifonico.bandcamp.com.

Also included in my current dawn chorus: Micro Moon, an Anglo-Spanish duo whose piano-led EP Figure in a Landscape takes inspiration from both the concrete sound mirrors of Romney Marsh and the hydroelectric “Fábrica da Luz” of the Galician mountains. Hear its lingering echoes at claypipemusic.co.uk. Whitby duo David Owen and Rebecca Denniff have given a CD release to their sprawling electro-folk project A Year on Bonfire Hill, celebrating the tangled weirdness that infuses this mythical moorland location on “darkling nights when the veil is thin”. Put your wellies on and head to bonfirehill.bandcamp.com. And those who like their haunted soundtracks with a glittery disco beat should shake a leg to Starburst – The Album, a celebration of the legendary British sci-fi magazine from Phil “British Stereo Collective” Heeks. Shimmy to thebritishstereocollective.bandcamp.com and groove along with the theme from ‘Moonbase Britannica’.

Anyone seeking quieter refuge, however, could perhaps consider praying at the altar of David Soulscorch’s snappily-titled Rural District Lo-Fi Recording Project. David’s new album Time Travelling in a Sussex Church combines soothing drones with field recordings from a South Downs place of worship whose exact location remains a closely-guarded secret. Pealing bells, chirruping birdsong and the authoritative voice of tour guide Lucy Laguda are woven around gently elegiac beats.

“Come springtime, the Saxon graveyards are full of ox-eye daisies and every shadow is a peep into the past,” explains David, poetically. “And I really enjoy using my pocket microphone to record old church doors”. Visit ruraldistrictlofirecordingproject.bandcamp.com, where he’s probably still pottering around the vestibule.