The Noise Made by People

Broadcast: the name of this band was, for me, actively off-putting. If it conjured up any kind of associations, they were anodyne ones. While I'd read about them any number of times, it was only after the release of their collaborative album Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age in 2009 that I began to investigate their work, and to realise what I'd been missing out on. Not much more than a year after that came the desperately sad news that their singer Trish Keenan had died.

Having first obtained their music by way of file-sharing, there did't seem any great hurry to buy their albums on physical media, but, at length, I did the right thing and acquired the three studio albums on CD, beginning with 2000's The Noise Made by People. It often happens that I'm attracted to music with a cooler emotional temperature, and Broadcast's sound strikes me as particularly chilly, and also - figuratively - sharp-edged, metallic and bright - like something that could easily give me a migraine if I stared at it for too long.

Their songs are unsettling places to linger in, but I find them fascinating. My favourites on the disc are among the more obvious ones: 'Unchanging Window', 'Echo's Answer' and, especially, 'Come On Let's Go', but the more abstract instrumental numbers likewise contribute splendidly to the whole.

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All Wrapped Up

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