Track Listing

1. Intro/Magnetic Tales
2. Be Colony
3. How Do You Get Along Sir?
4. Will You Read Me
5. Reception/Group Therapy
6. Quiet Moment
7. I See, So I See So
8. You Must Wake
9. One Million Years Ago
10. Seancing Song
11. Mr. Beard, You Chatterbox
12. Drug Party
13. Libra, the Mirror's Minor Self
14. Love's Long Listen-In
15. We Are After All Here
16. Medium's High
17. Ritual/Looking In
18. Make My Sleep His Song
19. Royal Chant
20. What I Saw
21. Let It Begin/Oh Joy
22. Round and Round and Round
23. Be Colony/Dashing Home/What on Earth Took You?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5446 in Music
• Released on: 2009-10-27
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: EP
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Album Description
BROADCAST are back with a new unique psychedelic collaborative album with renowned graphic and musical artist JULIAN HOUSE (aka THE FOCUS GROUP) titled, 'Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age'. BROADCAST (Trish Keenan & James Cargill), have collaborated with renowned designer Julian House (aka The Focus Group) to create a unique album pulling in both collaborators' unique sense of melody and love of library music and film scores. After a long hiatus, it can be said with confidence that Broadcast's return is greeted with much anticipation. From their beginnings in 1995, Broadcast's aesthetic has remained a combination of their love for film, library music and electronics with psych-pop colour - a style which has gained them an enthusiastic fanbase including musicians such as FLYING LOTUS, STEREOLAB, GRIZZLY BEAR, ATLAS SOUND (who they are now sharing a co-headline tour of the US) and DANGERMOUSE. Their music is also a popular choice for film and TV, feat. on the soundtracks of many films as well as TV shows such as "The L-Word", "Skins" and "CSI".

Customer Reviews

the most experimental of '66


As much as I hate to say it, I've found myself disappointed with this ep despite my wishes to like it. From their first singles to now, Broadcast has consistently moved toward this sound, but this record leaves behind anything at all that could be considered winsome or pretty, descriptions that definitely fit their earliest work. It's a full-on barrage of psychedelia, in the 'bad trip' sense of the word; I've heard others compare their more recent far with The United States of America/Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, which makes sense; but here, it's as if Broadcast has discarded all semblence of friendliness, taking the harshest examples of those bands' sound and running them end over end to the very last note. The dissonance and 'treated' quality of the music, the vocals especially, is taken to the breaking point, and sadly, I find it very alienating. On a blog somewhere a fan wrote about seeing them (on their recent tour) and said he was glad he wasn't on any mind-expanding drugs, because the music has become so wholly dissonant and claustrophobic - and I agree; it's like a sound collage for a bad trip. Take the darkest moments of early Pink Floyd and make that your bread and butter, and you'll get the idea. Yes, it's brilliant in its way; and yes, they're excellent at creating that sound and making something unique from the remnants of the darkest of psychedelia. But no, I don't care for it, wishing, really, that they'd hark back to the feel of their earlier work, where, though chill, there was human warmth in the music, musically and lyrically.

A Complete Experience.
First I would say this album is not to be listened to in pieces, or by favorite track. It's almost a modern rebirth of concept full albums as we're starting to see everywhere, even with the Flaming Lips newest release "Embryonic." This Broadcast collaboration is a selection of sounds and voice to fit a time when your willing to completely shut up and experience.

The shift between tracks that contain a memorable melody, beat and tracks that are an imagination of ambience plays almost as a reflection of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at times and definetely has futuristic interpretations of a beatelesque sound, especially in "The Be Colony."

The drums pull from acid jazz, jazz, and hip-hop as is typical in Broadcast releases, giving it that trip-hop feel at times, but just when you think they've played what will be a looped clip for the next four minutes of a song, the sound is forgotten and goes away.
I understand the fear of experiencing this while under the influence of something, but the human element really is there, it isn't machine at all, both in it's continuity and it's refusal to repeat. It's like a completely organic sound expressed through the tissue of what seems as inanimate things. Half of modern music has the ability to produce a bad trip if someone is doing drugs, so that's really not a fair method of review...that being said the sound does get a bit over the top at times. In the psychadelic light of the music, the pull from a general flow to a climax of sound, leaves an incredible amount of suspence, such as in "Ritual / Looking In" which can be uncomfortable at times. The sound of animals also adds a strange factor, and could really trip a tripper out..kind of like a coco rosie's album. This factor though adds to the complete feel this album gives, sometimes you're left flying, drowning, in a forest, in the snow and all in sound.

This review might seem a bit metaphoric in its description but it's rather necessary to get it's undestanding across. The mixing is beautifully done, and sometimes carries with it a bit of poking fun at the elements used in echo and ambience to remind the listener that they are in complete control of their technique.

This album is warm, wise, sarcastic and pretty genius if you understand the genre..capable of surprising even the most avid Broadcast fan.

possibly the psychedelic record of the decade!
Upon first listen, it seems cacaphonous - scraps of songs mixed together with joyful abandon but with very little for the listener to hang onto. This takes a little deep listening. It took me a good three spins before "Witch Cults" clicked.

I played it quiet. I played it loud. I cleaned the kitchen to it. On that third listen, as track 17 "Ritual/Looking In" cycled and droned into its final shape, I had an epiphany. From that song to the end of the album it was a gorgeous psychedelic quilt of ideas, from minimal funk and break-beat passages to buried animal sounds (warning: your dog will bark at this album) to blurry passages of what sounds almost like the Peanuts' Christmas Album ("Royal Chant"). It's magic. And yes, it's the kind of magic that makes reindeer fly - psychedelic magic. Primal and messy and hungry, capable of crystalline beauty as much as yawning black mouths of anonymous menace.

Normally, I'm a proponent of linear experience. Listen to albums start to finish, the way the artists intended them. But with "Witch Cults" I suggest doing just what I did: turning it up and playing tracks 17-23. The first half of the album is a lot more chaotic, at least until you get the decoder ring that must be buried in the subsonic frequencies of that final stretch of songs. Snippets of song ideas appear and disappear without anouncement (all 23 tracks run together). Moments of particular beauty or particularly interesting structure emerge once, never to reappear. It's a little crazy, as if deliberately designed to make you feel slightly off-center. I get the feeling Broadcast/Focus Group wrote 50-100 songs and sliced and diced and arranged and warped and distilled them down into 23. At other times, objects of real musical craftsmanship (such as the not quite acapella "Make My Sleep His Song") drift out of all the overlapped waves. I don't think my listening method should be the ONLY way to listen to it, obviously, but it helped me get over the hump with this one... now I listen to it start to finish.

It has been suggested by more than one reviewer that this sort of music could only have been produced under the influence. I, on the other hand, have a hard time believing something that takes me on such an intricate, dense and layered journey could be the random outcomes of mind alteration. To me, this feels like more of a drug-free trip, the kind that just uses the natural chemicals already in your body and engages the primitive part of your brain. Then again, song titles like "Drug Party" suggest I might be wrong. Also, I don't think it's necessary to heap a lot of fan disappointment on this mini-album -- it's obviously an experimental foray, and if you don't like that kind of stuff it's not going to magically turn into a pop album for you. No need to punish the band for following their muse.

"...Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age" doesn't invite you in with melody, or lull you with conventional beauty. It pushes you. I admit, I like the weird stuff. I think Black Flag's "The Process Of Weeding Out" is much, much more than Greg Ginn guitar wankery. I even kinda like "Lumpy Gravy" and "Metal Machine Music" ...really! I'm not saying this new Broadcast mini-album is as impenetrable or stark as either of those - honestly, the moments where grooves DO lock up or beautiful harmonies DO repeat more than once are fleeting, but quite rewarding, like they mashed all their best ideas of the last four years into this 50-minute recording.

If they're willing to traverse this sort of territory for this mini-album, I'm excited to see these methods applied to less abstract song frameworks. It leaves me very eager for their next proper full-length, due in 2010.