Broadcast's output was remarkably meticulous. In their 16 years together as a group, through various lineup changes that saw them ultimately shaved down to the duo of Trish Keenan and James Cargill, they released just four full-length studio albums. There was certainly a decent amount of other work that sprung up in the gaps between those records, but often a protracted silence would settle on the band. It wasn't hard to imagine a permutation of the Broadcast lineup locked away in a studio during those times, agonizing over pink noise settings, crafting a set of lyrics that sat just right with Keenan's detached delivery, mulling over sleeve design with longtime cohort Julian House of the Focus Group. As the world outside sped up they seemed to slow down, getting a little more lost in their own sound with every passing year.
Their final work together before Keenan's sad passing in 2011, the manic cut-and-paste Focus Group collaboration Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, spewed Broadcast out into a disorienting space, deliberately clipping their pop wings. Their live shows from that era further emphasized the feeling, with Keenan and Cargill performing in near darkness, facing one another while hunched over tables laden with equipment, barely even acknowledging the presence of the audience. The sense of retreat from those shows was overpowering, even if it was the natural product of the insular existence the pair seemed to fall into over the course of their career. In the beginning they had easily traceable peers-- labelmates Stereolab, fellow Birmingham bands Plone and Pram-- but by the time of Witch Cults they were mostly out on their own. Even the "hauntology" sub-genre felt too parochial for a band that had such potentially limitless scope within its grasp.
It feels appropriate that one of Keenan and Cargill's final works together is a largely instrumental soundtrack to filmmaker Peter Strickland’s 2012 feature Berberian Sound Studio. The film follows a British man who travels to Italy in the 1970s to work on the sound design of a schlocky giallo movie, only to be driven to the point of self-destruction by his own creations. Broadcast are a natural fit for such a project, their working methods clearly mirroring the obsessive, isolationist approach of Strickland's central character. Their music often has a filmy élan to it, bearing traces of composers such as Krzysztof Komeda's work for Roman Polanski and Luboš Fišer's score for Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. It's not clear who did what here-- Keenan and Cargill began working on this project together, with the latter completing the score after Keenan's passing-- but it picks up on the similarly fractured thread sewn throughout Witch Cults, with 39 tracks included, many of them barely making it over the one-minute mark.
That Broadcast were still working deeply in the abstract suggests they were keen to further explore the ideas embedded in that last record. According to Cargill, we may find that out at some point in the future. For now, all we have is this, an album that arches away from Witch Cults in subtle ways, dialling down the self-consciously quirky material that periodically surfaced on that record and bringing a conspicuous feeling of terror closer to the surface. Berberian Sound Studio is all bone-chilling screams, deep red blood spilling across decaying celluloid, knives being raised pointedly in the air. It's the work of people enamored by the common devices of horror, who want to see how pliable that material is so they can find their own entry point into it.
This isn't an album easily broken down into tracks, but the influence of Herk Harvey's sinister organ grind from the classic Carnival of Souls surfaces sporadically ("Beautiful Hair", "Treatise") as do great bursts of menacing analog synth reminiscent of Fabio Frizzi's score for Zombie Flesh Eaters ("Mark of the Devil", "Found Scalded, Found Drowned"). Elsewhere, pieces of dialog from the film are regularly worked in, often through creepily whispered female voices reminiscent of a similar trick deployed on Goblin's Suspiria soundtrack ("Monica's Burial", "Anima di Cristo"). Occasionally there are even Broadcastian touches-- the keyboard refrain on "The North Downs Dimension" is noticeably similar to the one deployed on "You and Me in Time" from Tender Buttons. But mostly this is an attempt at subtlety emulating the work of others, of generating chills from an eerie sparseness (the quite beautiful "Teresa, Lark of Ascension") or from dense, compact forms (the strident "The Equestrian Vortex").
What prevents Berberian Sound Studio from being a genre exercise is the care taken to paper over the cracks, to find some common ground between droney, Popol Vuh-type material ("Valeria’s Burial (Under the Fort)") and more visceral horror soundtrack work (the positively seething "The Game's Up"). It's undoubtedly derived from that high level of fastidiousness Keenan and Cargill always applied to their work together, but it also demonstrates what big-picture thinkers they were, able to forge unseen connections between disparate, barely heard musicians. It's what gives an album like this, drawn from so many sources, a recognizable identity of its own, and it's what gave their ever-evolving career a solid grounding in a world that was recognizably theirs.
