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The Haunted Generation is also a regular column in Fortean Times magazine, rounding up new releases and forthcoming events. From Issue 432, dated June 2023…

THE HAUNTED GENERATION

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

“Please treat the church and houses with care,” reads an anonymous but heartfelt note, pinned to the wooden door of a Dorset church since December 1943. “We have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly…”

The story of Tyneham is one of great sacrifice and – ultimately – unbearable yearning. With plans afoot for the 1944 Normandy landings, this sleepy village was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for military exercises, its 225 residents permanently rehomed. And, despite the bittersweet optimism of one concerned notewriter, they were never to return. Eighty years later, the village remains uninhabited and partially reclaimed by nature, a spectral echo of a long-lost community. In 2012, it provided the inspiration for a gently affecting album, Tyneham House.

The record is a plaintive collection of softly-plucked guitar, wistful Mellotron and rustling field recordings, a melodic amble around Tyneham’s half-demolished cottages and deserted schoolrooms. It has now been freshly reissued on vinyl, but the two musicians involved have always remained resolutely anonymous. “It just seemed unimportant really, who we were,” one of them discreetly tells me. “That being said, I can’t pretend I don’t love a good mystery, and I think we both loved the idea that years after we made it someone might find an old battered copy in the back of a charity shop and wonder what it was all about…”. Tyneham House is now available again from claypipemusic.co.uk.

Josephine Foster, it seems, is similarly haunted by the occasionally chilling winds of the early 20th century. Her new album Domestic Sphere offers an intriguing US take on hauntology, sounding for all the world like a fractured slab of shellac from Depression-era America. Here, she has surrounded her unearthly warble of a voice with scraps of spectral guitar and the piercing wail of Tennessee desert cats, and on one touching track – the appropriately-titled ‘Reminiscence’ – she is accompanied by the crackly vocals of her own late great-grandmother, Filomena Maltese. Head to josephinefostermusic.bandcamp.com. Equally in thrall to the distinctly globular is Penelope Trappes, whose new album Heavenly Spheres is a darkly dreamlike collection for voice, upright piano and hissing German reel-to-reel tape recorder. Lovers of MR James will thrill to discover it was recorded, in blissful isolation, in the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh, the setting for A Warning To The Curious. Although apparently Penelope took more inspiration from her two-week residency in the former home of Imogen Holst than from a midnight quest to unearth the lost crown of Anglia. Still, it’s a beautiful album and it’s available from penelopetrappes.bandcamp.com.

It’s clearly quite the month for lovers of antiquated tape hiss. Similarly experimenting with the comforting wheeze of analogue technology is Cate Brooks, whose new album Tapeworks is a love letter to a 1960s tape recorder salvaged from a Lowestoft junk shop in the late 1990s. Complete, apparently, with a demonstration tape used by the previous owner to record a TV performance by Billy Fury and the accompanying chirrups of a budgie now (presumably) long since expired and gone to join the Choir Invisible. Cate’s record is an immersive haze of slow, ambient synth textures and half-heard vocals (courtesy of Goldfrapp collaborator Hazel Mills), all looped on the clunking reels of this vintage gizmo. And the hissing of ancient tapes accumulates as the album progresses, become an evocative instrument in its own right. It’s available from cafekaput.bandcamp.com.

Elsewhere, anyone in the mood for beasties? This column wouldn’t be the same without beasties. Mombi Yuleman’s new album The Curse Of Spring-Heeled Jack is a delightfully cinematic homage to the notoriously boingy demon reported to be leaping effortlessly between British rooftops in the late 19th century, and a quick hop over to mombiyuleman.bandcamp.com should secure a copy. I can also recommend Dreaming Eden, a new album by Lisbon-based scenester João Branco Kyron. The main mover in Portuguese acid-folk band Beautify Junkyards, João has used Christopher Priest’s 1977 novel A Dream Of Wessex – about a collective of disillusioned idealists who retreat into a virtual utopia – as the inspiration for an album of pulsating beats and psychedelic textures. Dream yourself over to ghostbox.co.uk/belbury-music .

Meanwhile, those keen to retreat into a very real utopia of 1970s film soundtracks should drive a battered Ford Granada to buriedtreasure.bandcamp.com. Here, unalloyed joy can be found in a new compilation titled Programme Music: More Themes From The Josef Weinberger Archive 1965-80. A riot of wah-wah guitars, funky beats and sensuously throbbing organs, it’s a selection of library music composed and recorded by the finest mutton-chopped session veterans of the era. Tracks like ‘Stoned’, ‘Brown Velvet’ and ‘The Witching Hour’ will transport those of a certain mindset to an era when nylon shirts from C&A came complete with Campari stains and ever-evolving underarm sweat patches. All this and the theme from Screen Test, too.