Featured Essay: A ‘hauntological’ Halloween Essential by Broadcast and The Focus Group  

by Alexander James

My stepfather owns Broadcast and The Focus Group’s 2009 album Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age. A longtime fan of Trish Keenan and James Cargill (who made up Broadcast at the time), his affection for its strange world long ago became mine.  For me, this ‘hauntological’ Halloween excursion is top-tier. 

It’s an unlikely synthesis created by an album which has frequently been described as quintessentially English, despite both groups complicated relationship to that identify. It’s mixture of psychedelic songwriting, early electronic samples, fractured melodies and esoteric sources makes it a fitting soundtrack to autumn: at once it is nostalgic and comforting, with something unsettling just beneath the surface to keep you reminded of change.

My family lives in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge and numerous other Neolithic monuments and burial grounds. We’re fairly obsessed with them. Visits home during the holidays have often meant long runs and cycles across the North Wessex Downs Area of Natural Beauty, through a landscape scattered with stone circles, ancient earthworks and Iron Age hillforts. The stories surrounding these places have fed a longstanding fascination with Britain’s folkloric past, and this record, to me, inhabits the same landscape.

Across its 23 tracks, Broadcast’s melodic sensibility, heady echoes and electronics meets Julian House’s (the producer and graphic designer behind The Focus Group) jaunty, restless sound collages.

The groups inputs each other so much – visceral presence and shifts in sound, a sort textural intoxication and new scenarios sweep you up and drop you in. Human presence supplied by Trish Keenan’s voice gives these shifting surroundings a human presence breaks down the barrier between myth and reality and making the most disorientating passages feel strangely familiar.

‘The Be Colony’ offers an early foothold, its gently unfolding psychedelia recalling Syd Barrett. Elsewhere, the heavy, unhurried beat of ‘Will You Read Me’ and the flute in ‘Reception / Group Therapy’ give the fragmented arrangements a loose groove. On ‘A Seancing Song’, Keenan’s voice takes on the eerie simplicity of a broken children’s rhyme. These moments linger as the music keeps slipping into another scene.

Heard together, the fragments create a world that feels coherent without ever becoming entirely knowable.

It recalls the pastoral strangeness of The Wicker Man, where folk songs and rural rituals acquire an increasingly sinister significance. Flutes, scraps of speech and ghostly electronics suggest a countryside full of half-remembered stories. There is warmth here, too, which makes the unease more persuasive.

Although I associate it most strongly with autumn and the approach of Halloween, it also suits languid mid-summer days, when the landscape feels still and slightly unreal. Listening brings me back to those Wiltshire downs and the histories we imagine beneath them, giving that fascination a sound.

Alexander James is a freelance journalist based in London.