What their label says...
Music For Men Of Letters
- A Man’s Head (Waltz For George Simenon)
- The Recidivist (Theme For Imagined Simenon Story)
- Man On Wire (Ivor Gurney’s Noise)
- (Colin Wilson Says) Like Brandy On A Cold Night
- Dream Road Trip With Dustbowl Philosopher (Music For John Steinbeck)
- The Life Behind The Life (Fragments for John Cowper Powys)
- Spirit Photography (Invoking Arthur Conan Doyle)
Music For Imagined Technologies
- The Anglo-French Music Machine
- Avian Battery Machine
- Via The Cavity Magnetron
- Even Solemnity In The Instruments (Farina’s Automatic Translation Machine)
Music For Flotsam and Jetsam
- Two Tides Meet
- Last Strange Voyage (Lament For Donald)
- Imagined South Coast Boarding House (in Which Sits David Jones)
- Another Favourite Beach
“We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials.”
(John Cowper Powys)
Ghostwriter is the fascinating project of Devon-based Mark Brend; musician, author and respected expert on antiquarian sound apparatus (you may well know his book, Strange Sounds: Offbeat Instruments and Sonic Experiments in Pop – the definitive text on the subject). The Continuing Adventures Of The Strange Sound Association is his first longplayer under the Ghostwriter moniker. It is an album like no other.
Partially based upon archive voice recordings, fragmentary texts and ‘imagined works’ by literary figures eminent (Arthur Conan Doyle, John Steibeck), cult (Colin Wilson, John Cowper Powys) and arcane (Arthur Machen, Ivor Gurney), The Continuing Adventures… weaves ethereal atmosphere, wistful song and playful soundscape from a battery of instruments and sound sources, including dulcitone, persephone, harpsichord, autoharp, toy piano, modular synthesizer, recorder, banjo, accordion, bass, drums, sampler, miscellaneous voices and something called the brendonium.
Divided into three distinct ‘Chapters’: Music For Men Of Letters, Music For Imagined Technologies and Music For Flotsam and Jetsam, these mysteriously beguiling compositions run the gamut from frisky, jazz-flavoured vignettes to garden shed electronica and contemplative sound collages via Wicker Man folk and bygone soundtrack esoterica. Beyond easy categorisation, this is music informed as much by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the British Sound Archive as it is various currents in leftfield pop, electronica, folk and plunderphonics.
Brend is assisted in his endeavours by a number of additional musicians and collaborators, including multi-instrumentalists Tim Conway and Matt Gale (Farina), singer Suzy Mangion (Piano Magic, George) and analogue synth collector Darren Hayman (Hefner), among several others. Ghostwriter‘s debut album is very much a product of Brend’s own unique imagination and compositional vision, however.
In addition to the sound recordings, the inquisitive will be ushered toward a bespoke, members-only, Ghostwriter website where an accompanying text (and other related information) will also be made available. Access to this material is by means of a code secreted about the album’s luxuriant packaging.