Broadcast & The Focus Group - Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age

What’s in a title? One of the central tenets of pop music’s legacy is a tendency towards arbitrary naming, as an afterthought to the main event, a necessary piece of decorative icing on the cake. Broadcast are as ‘pop’ a phenomenon as anything of this mixed-up decade, digging through our sandpit of cultural detritus to extract tiny nuggets – a folk melody here, a sampled wash of crackling noise there – and piecing them into strangely familiar assemblies that simultaneously evoke childlike nostalgia and the knowing wink of adult humour. Initially seen as an anomaly on Warp’s beat‘n’bleep-riddled roster, in the wake of the label’s expansion into fields hitherto unexplored they seem more at home there than ever, slotted between Boards Of Canada’s sepia-tinted imagery and the wistful folk-jams of Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House.

So, to return to this piece’s opening gambit: in the case of Broadcast’s new collaborative mini-album with The Focus Group, an awful lot. In a recent interview with The Wire magazine, singer Trish Keenan revealed that the theme and title came first, followed by a swift gestation period and even faster final delivery. It shows; Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age is drenched in a sense of half-remembered joy, yet masked behind the crackle and interference of an ancient signal, finally picked up fifty or a hundred years after its original transmission. Very few of its 23 tracks are fully realised songs – instead, during the sketches between isolated nodes, The Focus Group’s Julian House draws lines between the fairground lilt of ‘The Be Colony’ and the gently plucked Euro-pop of ‘I See, So I See So’ in delicate shades of feedback and angular sample-play.

During the same interview, James Cargill compared the end result to Mikhail Bulgakov’s mercurial masterpiece The Master And Margarita. The parallel couldn’t be more apt. The diabolical antics of Bulgakov’s misfits as they terrorize Moscow are cheeky and mischievous even as they retain the power to shock and horrify. The same is true of Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age. ‘Mr. Beard, You Chatterbox’ paints a genuinely unsettling landscape in circus instrumentation, and the rise and fall of crowd chatter during ‘A Quiet Moment’ brings to mind Margarita’s place as guest of honour at the devil’s grand ball as swiftly as it does Jack Torrance’s descent into madness in the profoundly empty corridors of the Overlook Hotel.

As with all of Broadcast’s music, there’s a profound sense of cognitive dissonance at play across the album’s run-time. They skirt the fine line between what memory tells you and the reality of what occurred by obscuring the mind’s obvious landmarks in a dizzying whirl of synaesthetic colour and activity. The results are sometimes difficult to pin down, but frequently spectacular.

Rory Gibb.