The Advisory Circle - As The Crow Flies

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5...according to our Phil on Thu 07 Jul, 2011.

Woo! A new Advisory Circle album. That's a reason to celebrate. Time to crack open that bottle of bubbly, strip down to your pants and lay back sipping that nice bottle of Veuve Clicquot you've been saving for a special occasion. Anyhoo this is Mr Brooks's third album as The Advisory Circle (some of you may have heard some of his previous work as King Of Woolworths?) and a right doozy it is. Here he continues his exploration of vintage electronics, British folk and library music with some panache. Essentially it's a massive nostalgia fest. Beautiful electronics all wrapped up in delightful melodies. Ceridwen is a tiny little folk tune which sounds like the theme music to Chigley (or something similar). the Patchwork Explains is well Krypton Factor, the title track of the album is like a classic Kraftwerk tune. 'Modern Through Movement' is a take on a track on an old KPM album by Keith Mansfied and Terry Cox called 'Technology & Movement'. I love that tune.... it's like classic 80's futuristic TV theme music (along the lines of Tomorow's World or Airwolf). Spread across the album there are 19 nostalgia filled gems to be discovered an I'd strongly recommend this to anyone with a passing interest in vintage electronic music. Absolutely brilliant!

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The third album from The Advisory Circle, As the Crow Flies is an exploration of the passage of time and the traditional wheel of the year. The trademark Advisory Circle sound of achingly beautiful and melancholy melodic analogue electronics is given a broadened palette of traditional acoustic instrumentation.
Beautiful sleeve notes come courtesy of Professor Ronald Hutton, Head of History at Bristol University, author of a monumental work on the traditional British calendar, Stations of the Sun and a familiar face from many historical television documentaries. In maybe his strongest work for the label so far, Ghost Box in-house designer Julian House depicts composer Jon Brooks' ideas through the medium of an imagined TV title sequence, perhaps from a lost supernatural drama series for
children.

The Advisory Circle summon remembered sunlight from childhood summers even as their doleful melodies are laced with a deep sense of loss. Mark Fisher, The Wire

The Advisory Circle inhabit a half-remembered zone sure to resound with impressionable listeners of a certain age. Clean, cold sounds echo the electronic incidental music of 1970s public-information films and weird children’s television.
Stewart Lee, Sunday Times

Light synth melodies and fuzzy music fuse throughout to form a thing of rare beauty.
Stuart Aitken, Flux Magazine

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