Ghost Box: Test Transmission

Spent most of last night huddled in a secure location with Jim Jupp and Julian House of Ghost Box Records and Mark Pilkington from Strange Attractor. Conspiracy is such fun when you're in the right company.

Ghost Box is one of the nation's few institutions to appreciate the spectral presence that media take on as they pervade our lives - what gets left behind are only fragments of voices and the outlines of faces, a few phantom gestures and shared memories. By giving a narrative shape to such presences, Ghost Box releases always feel more like transcriptions of some past event rather than resorting to the status of being mere events in themselves - they have made a precise art out of fading into the background. Just try searching for Julian and Jim in a crowded public place and you'll see what I mean. Similarly, all three issues of Strange Attractor Journal seem to have emerged into the world fully-formed rather than simply having been published.

I' m not really in a position to go into any great detail at this stage, but there was some excited talk of further exchanges once the next Belbury Poly release goes into circulation - and quite a lot of speculation about test transmissions, thought projection, the pernicious influence of the cathode ray tube as opposed to the modern LCD flat screen - plus Mark told a great story about being chased out of Esalen by the Institute's security guards - but then we've come to expect nothing less from him. Newspaper story of the day: 'Man Saws Off Own Head In Protest'

To find out more about Ghost Box and to check out their new T-shirt design, visit them at http://www.ghostbox.co.uk/ They'll be waiting for you.