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Jon Mckiel
Bobby Joe Hope
You've Changed - 2020
Michael Panontin
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Jon Mckiel is sort of like all those diggers who sift through the thrift shops and garage sales rescuing and developing photographic negatives from the past, bringing back to life anonymous people who are long forgotten and, very likely, long dead. The Haligonian bought an old reel-to-reel tape deck back in 2015 - a Teac A-2340 for all you seventies hi-fi nerds - with some pre-recorded tapes thrown in as part of the deal. One of those tapes, which Mckiel has since named the Royal Sampler, contained some fascinating snippets from an unknown source.
A few years later, Mckiel took the tape out to Jay Crocker (a.k.a. electronic artist JOYFULTALK) and together the pair ensconced themselves in Crocker's Crousetown (NS) home studio to transform these sounds from analogue into tasty ten-second sampleable morsels that could be incorporated into Mckiel's next disc. The result, the beguilingly postmodern LP Bobby Joe Hope (named after the chap who sold him the deck), is a curious mix of blissed-out late-sixties psych and the eerie hauntological undertones that fans of Broadcast have come to know and love.
In the former camp is the delightful opener 'Mourning Dove', which takes a deceptively simple Bryan McClean/Forever Changes guitar loop, anchors it with some subtly placed keyboards and then stretches it out to nearly five minutes. It serves as a gloriously therapeutic tonic, especially in an age of coronavirus-filled newsfeeds and lockdown tension. And in the latter group, closing out Side 1 and kicking off Side 2 respectively, is the eerie two-minute fragment 'Night Garden', which wouldn't sound out of place on the Broadcast/Focus Group collab Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, followed by the wondrously hypnotic modern psych of 'Private Eye', which if push comes to shove is probably the best track on the record.
Bobby Joe Hope will unfortunately fly too far under the radar to be heard by many people, but it is definitely well worth your time (which we all know you have a lot of these days).
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You've Changed
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