OUT NOW: Castles in Space is delighted to have been able to curate an album pulled from Howlround’s unreleased tape archive – and this fabulous promo video created by the great Lori E. Allen to support it:
After twelve years, ten albums and innumerable live shows (including at least one former underground reservoir), the Howlround sound has indeed changed quite a lot, but the basic ethos remains the same as it did back in 2012. All tracks are created by manipulating field recordings dubbed onto analogue tape, with all digital effects and artificial reverb strictly forbidden – a process that has been described by Electronic Sound Magazine as ‘conjur[ing] magic’. Of the twelve tracks here, only one has been physically released on a limited edition and long out of print compilation. A second appeared on a download only release several years ago and a third was created as part of the unreleased soundtrack to a documentary. Everything else on this compilation is seeing the light of day for the first time.
All were created in South London at various periods between 2012 and 2017, five years during which the project evolved from the Radiophonic mournfulness of 2012’s debut album The Ghosts Of Bush (‘The ultimate Hauntological artefact’ – Simon Reynolds), to 2015’s tour with tape legend William Basinski, to 2016’s darker and weirder soundtrack to Steven McInerney’s multiple award-winning film A Creak In Time and on towards what would become the wilder, gnarlier noise of 2019’s The Debatable Lands. This retrospective from the first five years marks the gradual evolution of Howlround from the earliest days conjuring ‘aural ectoplasm’ from nocturnal field recordings of the last days of an underground BBC studio to increasingly spurning of the external world altogether by creating blistering no-input noise and raw analogue feedback.
It’s been quite a trip. And we’re not done yet. Thank you so much to Neil Mason over at Moonbuilding Magazine for making A Loop Where Time Becomes their Album of the Week! Have a read by clicking below:
If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Howlround, brace yourselves. Robin The Fog, the man behind all this, is a ferric wizard. What he does with tape is little short of astonishing… The amazing thing when you listen to all this is that there are no instruments involved whatsoever. No nothing. It all comes out of the air, be it a field recording he’s buggered about with, or his collection of reel-to-reel recorders capturing the sound of each other. There’s two versions, the vinyl, which delivers 12 tracks and the digital that’ll give you six bonus tracks including the epic 10-minute plus ‘Cradle Spools Version Tk3’ which feels like being hypnotised by bad weather as distance fog horns tell you all about it. Said it before and I’ll say it again, what Robin The Fog does with tape is pure magic.
By weird coincidence, given that this is an archival release and features outtakes left off from Howlround’s debut album The Ghosts Of Bush (albeit reworked a few years later), the week before saw the publishing of an interview with the estimable Navel Gazers blog, originally recorded towards the end of last year, in which I reflected on the gestation of that very album at the behest of host Andrew Ciccone.
Over the course of a couple of hours we talked about Radiophonics, the BBC World Service, the joys of nightshifts, things going wrong in interesting ways (aka my entire career), and – with perhaps a little irony – never listening to or revisiting any work once you’ve finished making it. As mentioned here and repeated in my interview with Moonbuilding above, I’m not generally one for looking back or becoming nostalgic, so perhaps all of this might feel just a touch hypocritical. But in my defence it remains true that I’ve still never gone back and listened to The Ghosts Of Bush, not since that day in 2012 when I approved the test pressings.
Plus it’s a thoroughly timely opportunity to dig out these lovely old photos of the closing days of Bush House by my old mucker Hannah Brown, who these days trades as Kvist and does a beautiful line in screenprints. Make sure you follow her on Instagram too. Can’t believe it’s been almost twelve years!
Thanks very much to Andrew for having me and be sure to subscribe to Navel Gazers for more interviews with fellow geeky audio types. Previous guests include Matmos, Mark Vernon, Beatriz Ferreyra and Kate Carr, so we’re in very good company!
Robin The Fog 