2021: Album of the Year - Bright Magic (and Gig of the Year: Public Service Broadcasting)

A quick review of some favourite cultural moments from 2021.

"The city is built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built forever"

Alfred Tennyson

Album of the Year.

Bright Magic is the latest album from Public Service Broadcasting.

The band's J Willgoose Esquire moved to Berlin in 2018. He describes the process of making the album in the sleeve notes, which started with him identifying the title 'Bright Magic'.

"Ernst Bloch wrote that 'not all people exist in the same Now'. I would similarly assert that not all people exist in the same Where. We choose aspects of the history of a place or its people which captivate us. We construct our own maps, distorting a city's geography through our perception and experience of it, much like Guy Debord's 'Naked City'."

More in a review of the album.

A Eureka moment of sorts came in November 2018 when Willgoose heard Walter Ruttman’s radical Berlin tape-artwork Wochenende (or Weekend), which is sampled on three of Bright Magic’s tracks. Created in 1928, the piece collaged speech, field recordings and music into a sonic evocation of the city. Resolving to integrate these long-gone fragments with new manipulated sound sources, he set about making his own Wochenende, a narrative drama for the ears which decodes and realises the dreams of Berlin he’d constructed in his mind. J.Willgoose, Esq moved to Berlin from April 2019 to January 2020. Combining sound archaeology and the flâneuring of the psychogeographer, one street-level pursuit of the city’s energy involved Willgoose walking the Leipzigerstrasse, site of the city’s first electric streetlight, using a wide-band electromagnetic receiver from Moscow’s Soma Laboratories.

Source: https://roughtrade.com/gb/public-service-broadcasting/bright-magic/lp?channable=409d926964003331313937368e&gclid=CjwKCAiAn5uOBhADEiwA_pZwcI9I-N0iStWiqUrIJaWngxEI9Jdmde5SNxVjCl4Sj5_poHv5_B82KRoCadUQAvD_BwE

Here's a track from the album:

Public Service Broadcasting also gave the gig of the year, although this was a year when I saw very little live music once again, as gigs were cancelled. 

The staging was wonderful - each song linked with colours as described in the booklet that came with the CD. 

Check the band out if you haven't heard any of their stuff... 'Every Valley' chronicles the decline of the coal mining industry, and they have also told the story of the Race for Space.. and Mallory and Irvine on Everest...