The Psychic Circle

The Haunted Generation is also a regular column in Fortean Times magazine, rounding up new releases and forthcoming events. From Issue 459, dated July 2025…

THE HAUNTED GENERATION

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

“There are spirits here that you immediately sense,” says Ajay Saggar. “This church is an incredibly special place – it’s so isolated from the world outside, and a lot has happened here over the last 600 years. And with us being here, right now at this very moment, we’ve become part of that timespan”.

It’s a first for this column! We’re on location. Ajay’s new double album Summer in St Mary’s was performed entirely on the 19th Packard Chapel organ in St Mary’s Church in South Cowton, a North Yorkshire village once immortalised in the Domesday Book but now completely vanished. Its last remaining trace? This secluded 15th century place of worship, built for the villagers during the earliest Wars of the Roses by local toff Sir Richard Conyers. On a tranquil Friday morning almost six centuries later, the only living occupants of South Cowton are Ajay and myself, sitting in pale sunshine amidst crumbling gravestones while a murder of impatient crows circle ceaselessly above. But the album, recorded over two days of blissful ecclesiastical isolation, is testament to the spirit of the place – and to Sir Richard himself, who is buried beneath the altar.

“The tracks are joyous, and the building influenced that a lot,” says Ajay. “There were alabaster effigies of Sir Richard Conyers and his two wives in there, listening to me playing that music. They were my audience”. And the organ itself? Easy to play? “I swallowed a lot of dust!” he laughs. “It came flying out of the pipes, and my lungs suffered for a week afterwards. But I think it still sounds as good as it would have done in the late 1800s.”

Ajay’s album is released under his persona as Bhajan Bhoy, complete with an ebullient cover illustration of the man himself playing frantically for the jiving spectres of Sir Richard and his wives. Pull out all the stops at bhajanbhoy.bandcamp.com.

Similarly invoking the spirits of time and place are Paul Humphreys and Gregor Reid, aka Superhuman – although on this occasion the time in question is the 1970s, and the place is Glasgow. A utterly charming evocation of the duo’s shared Clydeside childhood, their new album Forgotten Playgrounds shamelessly raids the school music box and re-creates the halcyon days when bins were filled with crumpled cans of Irn-Bru and surrounded by clouds of angry wasps. It’s streaming now, with limited stocks of vinyl also available in the shops. Meanwhile, only slightly further south, Chambers is Pete Gofton’s musical homage to the spirits of Sunderland Civic Centre. Built in 1968 and demolished in 2022, this brace of Brutalist hexagons was rumoured to conceal a secret nuclear bunker, and Pete – recording as The All Golden – has poured his formative memories into a stirring synth album. Pick your way across the rubble to theallgolden.bandcamp.com.

Across the other side of the Pennines, Lancaster space cadet Richard “Synthetic Villains” Turner is looking to the stars. His new album Cosmic harks back to a childhood illuminated by both the adventures of orbiting NASA astronauts and the blasters and lightsabers of Star Wars. It’s a terrific collection, redolent of Joe Meek’s notorious 1960 sci-fi album I Hear a New World, and it’s currently awaiting lift-off at syntheticvillains.bandcamp.com. And in the same city, equally starstruck, is Mark “Field Lines Cartographer” Burford, whose new record Solar Maximum is a soothing modular tribute to the stations of the sun. Squint safely through a pinhole at fieldlinescartographer.bandcamp.com.

Also on my bleeping analogue radar this summer: Wizards of the Watchtower is a brilliant nod to horror-obsessed 1970s ‘eavy rock by mysterious (but undoubtedly hirsute) collective The Psychic Circle, and Fireside Spells is Klaus Morlock’s similarly authentic celebration of the golden age of the Ribena-filled chalice. Both are available from the delightful corner of occult weirdness that is libraryoftheoccult.bandcamp.com.

But have the warming fingers of summertime left you pining for endless childhood school holidays? The drippy choc ices? The red-hot upholstery of the family car? Maybe wallow in the bittersweet melancholy of Dreamland, the latest release from The Balloonist. It’s the work of Midlands musician Ben Holton, and the album’s shimmering textures perfectly encapsulate the languid inertia of sticky-fingered daytrips – as well as reflecting on the tender ache of loss.

“It began as an attempt to evoke my memories of travelling around the British countryside with my parents as a child,” explains Ben. “However, during its creation, my dad fell seriously ill and passed away. I found myself increasingly comforted by the sounds I made, almost burying myself in tape hiss, and the album inevitably took on a sadder tone”.

It’s a truly beautiful collection. Follow the faded road signs to waysideandwoodlandrecordings.bandcamp.com, and spare a thought on the way for the spirits of a particularly resonant time and place.