How to Write About Music: Excerpts from the 33 13 Series, Magazines, Books and Blogs with Advice from Industry-leading Writers by Marc Woodworth and Ally-Jane Grossan

Author:Marc Woodworth and Ally-Jane Grossan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

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But vaporwave’s weak gesturers are not the only contemporary musicians challenging the notion of a history as the endless progression of one damn thing after another.

Jim Jupp, the man behind the UK musical entity Belbury Poly and co-founder of Ghost Box Records, is all about crafting new and weird historical narratives. As the retro-historicist would duly note, Belbury Poly’s music contains samples from and references to library music, psychedelia, prog, and of course the creation, in the 1950s, of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Like the Mike Paradinas album, all these references feel nostalgic in an indeterminate sort of a way.

Of course, Jupp is acutely aware of all of this. Belbury Poly’s deliberate blending of samples with evocative and referential newly recorded materials deliberately makes us question our sense of nostalgia. How, after all, can we feel nostalgic for a past that we never experienced, or indeed that is not even a past? The array of historical references further disrupts our sense that this music emanates from a coherent musical narrative: as he noted in an interview for the Wire in 2009, “Not just for Belbury Poly but for the whole of Ghost Box, it’s 1958–1978 and it’s all at once, we take little slices through that continuum.”11

Belbury Poly’s real material is history itself: it is the sound of history being chopped, screwed, sampled, and re-enacted to form a complex miasma, in which odd moments of the past leap into and disrupt the present, at the same moment as the present stumbles blindly into a previously unknown past.

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