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Boomkat Product Review:

Despite reaching album number four and already having had Simon Reynolds sing his praises on Blissblog and in the Guardian, we've never really had any of Ian Hodgson’s Moon Wiring Club releases available other than a rather excellent split 7" release for Ghost Box. Following on from an impressive amount of media attention and praise flowing from all the right places, his new album "A Spare Tabby At The Cat's Wedding" finally arrives and is no doubt destined to grace many a year-end chart. Tapping into the same H**ntological conceit of making use of half-remembered childhood memories and rewiring them for subsequent use in music, British producers in particular have tended to focus on the Radiophonic era with impressively evocative results. Alongside better-known sci fi fare such as Doctor Who and the Tomorrow People, public service broadcasts, children’s programming and all sorts of televisual oddities are where Hodgson takes his primary influence, building on the sounds he remembers growing up with and turning them into something almost contemporary. The fingerprints of the 70s and 80s are still present, but the smudged-and-sequenced beats are more reminiscent of early Boards of Canada, or indeed the new wave of operators like D'eon. But where many producers mine funk, soul and psychedelic records for samples, Hodgson exclusively bases his productions around this specific period of British television history.

Pieced together using a Playstation 2 program (itself now archaic technology) there is a beauty to the music’s almost naïve construction that lends itself perfectly to the end product. You can almost imagine this music being pieced together on old tape equipment, and through the limitations of the software, Hodgson has found his stride. The songs on ‘A Spare Tabby At The Cat’s Wedding’ (Hodgson’s fourth album under the moniker) never get overly complex or tricky, instead relying on the heaps of well-mined samples to speak for themselves. Voices tumble over voices creating a cloud of half-heard words, and VHS-tainted synths bubble up beneath them, dragging us right back into a world of thick-knit sweaters and Marathon bars. It's a record that truly succeeds in bringing our ever-more-distant memories to some kind of focus without discolouring them a jot.

Oh and it should be mentioned that the vinyl version of this album is completely different - despite sharing some of the same track titles - all the material is unique to each format. Anyone out there who’s got even just a vague interest in the Ghost Box label, Broadcast or any of the 80s tinged landscapes of Olde English Spelling Bee should check it out without delay...

Cronky, shonky, eerie, beautifully confusing Northern English electronic magickal musicke.

The ultimate in Ghost Party Delirium since 1596 / 1908 / 2006

1. moonwiringclub.com