Broadcast, a band latterly comprised of the duo of Trish Keenan and James Cargill, have featured regularly in the last few decades of listening at OBLADADA.
Whilst the earlier recordings provide a lush counterpoint gathering everything from Stereolab, dreamy soundtracks, and vibrant late 60’s experimentalism, their later material gathers into something even more potent.
As things progressed, studio albums and numerous EP’s became more detailed and layered. A world of dreamlike, collaged reality, dusted in touches of radiophonic abstraction, dusty sunbeam drenched folk, oddly unsettling public information films, library music, and oblique electronics, all filtered into a zoetrope of blurred memories.
2009’s collaboration with The Focus Group – Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age somehow still feels like the time everything promised, finally spectacularly came together. All the threads, the influences, and ideas reaching a dizzying saturation point. A near 50-minute trip that tumbles any listener around in hundreds of twists and turns. Even now, any sweep through it, offers new details, somehow unnoticed in the hundreds of previous visits.
Then, whilst touring in Australia in 2011, after contracting swine flu, Keenan passed away at the age of just 42. Clearly the news was devasting to those that knew and loved her most closely, but simply as someone that had followed her glorious creative path, this felt savage.
In the intervening years her passing has remained a stinging one. Losing anyone is uniformly rubbish, forever wouldn’t be long enough, but it’s the poor souls that either didn’t get the chance or were taken whilst still having so much to offer, that often ache the most.
It’s easy to dream, in the intervening 13 years, accessed via some parallel dimension, Broadcast, Keenan and Cargill, would have continued to treat us to music along this bejewelled trajectory. It’s entirely reasonable to assume that somehow this might have just been the best music of their already stupendous creative arc…
Whilst what things could have been is an ultimately futile dream, the release of Spell Blanket does a sumptuous job of framing all these real and imaginary ghosts. Lovingly exhumed by Cargill from the cache of demos and outlines Keenan and he were working on in her final years, this album oddly captures the very essence of the entire project.
Realistically as Spell Blanket opens out over 36 tracks, it’s clear we are skimming over ideas that more than likely would have been further developed, edited, sliced and reworked. The framework and markers of the next album, a few EP’s, and who knows what…
The longest track here doesn’t even reach 4 minutes, but everyone gives a tantalising view into perfectly realised miniature world building. On that basis, taken as whole, it’s immediately a bit overwhelming, and several initial plays ended up looping individual tracks.
After the daydream dictaphoned The Song Before The Song Comes Out, the roaring fuzzy monster of March Of The Fleas outlines both extremes in less than 3 minutes. The sun-beamed glory of Greater Than Joy and the clock worked folk of Mother Plays Games eliminate any doubt this whole release was never going to be anything other than achingly beautiful.
My Marble Eye is the fleeting soundtrack to photo of that time the fairground came to town, Roses Red is gorgeous squealing feedback in a summer garden. Light refracting in Luminous Image, and the Raymond Scott toytown parade of A Little Light…
The tumbling, restless stream of ideas dances around like diamonds, each one a glimpse into a realm just beyond our own. Somehow the eventual space allowed to develop around Follow The Light is touchingly perfect centrepiece.
Tunnel View is a barefoot wander over grass whilst Crone Motion is an interlocking rhythmic joy in 55 blissful seconds. The whole thing dances and twists, spiralling, endlessly, before briefly hypnotising in the delirious peak of Colour In The Numbers.
The album closes with touching reality of I Am The Bridge – ‘I’m the bridge between the living, through my eyes, and through my giving’ and the gentle phased and flanged church organ end credits of Spirit House.
Spell Blanket is an undeniably emotional listen but somehow manages to avoid any sort of gloom, more of that strangely comforting happy sadness. Whilst all of this pivots on what we all know happened to Keenan, what her partner Cargill has done is equally brave and staggeringly beautiful in all this.
One thing I always take great comfort from is that over time the art and the artist become separate. What we are left with is the world they drew beyond their own time here, and here in Broadcast’s world, the effervescent multi-layered reality, continues to live, breathe and fly.
Spell Blanket is a both place to hide under, and a place to lay on, and marvel at the trees and clouds…
Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006-2009 is out now on Warp Records.
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