Brooks has come along way since the eerie and perverse wisdom of ‘The Stalker Song’ and Jo Wiley endorsed debut album, ‘Ming Star’. He’s come off the nimble and rather exclusive Beggars offshoot Mantra and arrived at the smaller, but no less eclectic Lo-Recordings – home to a curious breed of electronic phantasmagoria that ranges from Red Snapper, Barry 7s, Luke Vibert as well as dishing up collaborations with Squarepusher and Four Tet besides.
Like much of the material on Ming Star (2001) and L’Illustration Musicale (2003), Rediffusion sees Brooks and his bespectacled crew of retro addicts plunder the troves of sixties and seventies library music, singling out the works of the seminal BBC Radiophonic Workshop as a particular source of culpability. Cue sparkly, spangly synth noises, harpsichord-alike pianos, and lashings of the Queens English courtesy of some inspired snippets of Chumley Warner voiceover work on the grizzled and sci-fi tastic ‘Yellow World’.
Whilst it should come as no surprise to learn that Brooks dedicates a track on the album to the legendary Dr Who theme tune composer Delia Derbyshire, it’s an imaginative ear indeed that can Vulcan mind-meld an arsenal of wobbling moogs and arcs with a coolio Roy Budd classic, a Serge Gainsborough outtake and some fairly nimble footed breaks and beats. In certain contexts it sounds like Lemon Jelly, in others it is no less anachronistic than Jean Michel Jarre and Brian Eno.
Eastern-flavoured bossa (‘Slimcea Bossa’) elevator muzak (‘Big Sur’) and Morricone/Budd nightmares (‘Barrillas’) define an exhausting trawl through the archives of sound with some beautiful passages to boot. Retro fetishists of every media are bound to love it entirely.