Created by World Service studio manager Robin The Fog, ‘The Ghosts of Bush’ consists entirely of nocturnal location recordings made by him at Bush House, the iconic home of the BBC’s world service for over seven decades before it moved to a new location in July this year.
The recordings were mostly made during Robin’s night shifts at Bush House and then eventually manipulated on dual quarter-inch reel-to-reel machines, creating a seamlessly segued side of ghostly, decaying acoustic sounds captured within the stone-clad building’s numerous corridors, lifts, studios and stairwells. As you’d imagine, the effect is immensely evocative, at once recalling Daphne Oram’s most isolated experiments, Konstantin Raudive’s famous EVP recordings, the disintegrating loops of William Basinski, even Burial’s most haunting interludes, and not least AFX’s ‘Saw II’ classic; a phosphorescing mass of ferric-stroked midnight sonorities and metaphysical murmurs, or as the artist himself puts it “The sounds the building makes when it thinks no one is listening”. Third and final pressing of this much sought-after Hauntological artefact. Edition of 400 copies pressed on white vinyl.