Blog: Beats Per Minute

It's difficult to review music like that of Jon Brooks' The Advisory Circle. Why? Because such music purposely exists outside of the contemporary pop discourse. Brooks remains fascinated with halcyon memories of Cold War PSA culture and the musique concrète electronic explorations of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. His work is therefore derivative by definition, and while such blatant reliance upon nostalgia as a selling point might seem heavy-handed elsewhere, within the Ghost Box domain it becomes as necessary a philosophical underpinning as anarchy was to punk and anti-commercial apathy was to grunge. Never mind the fact that punk and grunge [...]