Hearth & Horn

Oh man, I really want to collect more of the Ghost Box albums but...they're kinda expensive, and they're both:

1. Hit and miss
2. The kind of music you really need to listen to the whole album four times through before it gets under your skin and you really appreciate it
3. Rare

Which is a bad combination, because you have to jump at them when they come out; invest in them on trust; and then listen and hope that gamble will have paid off. I understand that's the kind of pre-internet, old-world experience I'm kinda craving right now; at the same time, I'm simply not in the position to collect new expensive niche records pretending to be old expensive niche records. And because the fact they can only be sourced from a boutique online store, or from collectors, wrecks some of the tangible magic of finding them in a bargain bin - and that tangible 1970s magic being part of what Ghost Box sells. I mean look at them:






They've got this freakin delicious crunch to them. I can't even explain what that means.

I've been listening to Seance at Hobs Lane recently, and I am completely obsessed beyond words with it. But it took three listens for it to get deep under my skin, and stay there - and then trip me out into an otherworld laid across the land, the red eyes of dogs, the snarling in the heart, the lengthening of ears, the red star above the landscape, empty roads, fogs, rains that come from nowhere and recede, diversion signs to nowhere, and the thing from the forest whispering in my ear. That's the feeling I'm kinda seeking from these albums, the very feeling which they themselves promise to provide - but it's subtle, of course, and that's back to where we started. I can't collect a handful of them on a whim to find out which ones affect me; and I don't want to taste-test them all on the internet to find out, because that partially defeats the experience as well.

Oh world, please open up the worlds of work to me, that I might exchange my hours upon this earth for the possession of consumer objects, that so by collecting I may ward off the inevitability of approaching death.