FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Broadcast - The Noise Made by People
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THIS Vinyl Corner…
is all about an album that a lot of people might now know about. Broadcast were an Electronic band formed in Birmingham in 1995 by Trish Keenan (vocals, keyboards, guitar) and James Cargill (bass). The last album from the band, 2013’s Berberian Sound Studio, was a soundtrack for the 2012 film of the same name. Tragically, their lead, Trish Keenan, died in 2011. In terms of debuts, Broadcast’s The Noise Made by People (2000) is one of the best of that decade. That being said, it is an album that passed a lot of people by. Maybe more of a cult concern than a mainstream success. Released on 20th March, it is such a beautiful album that anyone can play and feel moved by. One does not need to know anything about Broadcast to love The Noise Made by People. Given the strength of the band and the incredible vocals of Keenan, I have been listening to The Noise Made by People on and off since its release. I am going to bring in a positive review of the album soon. Before that, Stereogum celebrated twenty years of a stunning debut:
“To look at Broadcast 20 years after their full-length debut The Noise Made By People is to confront the idea of what “psychedelic” meant at the end of the 20th century, both before and after they made their mark. Case in point: The first place you likely heard their music was coming across “The Book Lovers” on the soundtrack to 1997’s go-go spy spoof Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery, and the last was almost assuredly the foley-room-nightmare score to 2012’s psychotronic existential thriller Berberian Sound Studio. How pop culture got from one of those points to the other is a process far more involved than just one band can encompass. But the fact that Broadcast was around for it all, from campy comedy to uncanny eeriness, means that even their first full-length album felt like a crucial step towards a more sophisticated, less caricatured notion of what psychedelia even meant for a new millennium.
The Noise Made By People is in an odd position itself: It’s such an accomplished debut album that it obscures the years-long struggle it took to come out, but it’s also considered more of a component of a body of work than a particularly definitive standout effort. It came at the peak of the idea of Broadcast as a singles band — between 1999 and 2000 they released three of them, plus the two Extended Play EPs — but the instrumental album-track abstractions that would be considered filler on another band’s records turned out to be just as crucial to Broadcast’s reputation in the future.
It’s easy to hear why they touched so many twisted nerves: There was a particular DIY appeal to a band with a background of self-taught musicianship that, in Keenan’s words to CMJ, translated their interest in “intricate music by people who really know their shit” into “this weird area where… you’re limited to your technique, and it comes out in a weird or unusual way.” Not with the adolescent, noisy bluntness of punk or garage rock, but something more immersively mysterious. Still, even in their early work, it’s impossible to listen to Keenan’s voice and come away with a sense of amateurishness. As someone whose ear for pop was as instinctual as it was adventurous, she was able to transmute that into one of the most graceful voices to front an indie-pop band, ever: melodies that sound like someone reacting to wonder for the first time and providing it for someone else in the process. Sophisticated and hinting at old-soul experience beyond her years, yet to-the-point enough to emphasize the evocative simplicity in her lyrics’ language, Keenan’s singing voice was the most immediately arresting component of a group hardly content to settle for workaday rocking out.
What kept The Noise Made By People from capitalizing quickly on that fast-building circa-’97 buzz, unfortunately, was a succession of misguided producers who thought rocking out was what would make them stars. After three strikes’ worth of dealing with wannabe auteurs attempting to steer them towards something more radio-ready — and replacing Pram-bound Perkins for new drummer Keith York — Broadcast capped off a nearly three-year album recording process by finishing all the production and engineering themselves (with a bit of a motivational assist from Squarepusher). While this earned them a rep for difficulty in the studio, The Noise Made By People seemed to arrive fully lived-in as a result, an unfiltered culmination of worried-over sounds that felt like they’d plugged a hole in a musical negative space that was waiting decades for them.
It’s a remarkable album just on a pure listening basis. Figuring out the specifics of their equipment is best left to the gearheads, and while it’s fun to speculate what kind of resurrected old analog synths, ring modulators, ribbon mics, and effects pedals might have been scrounged up and daisy-chained into operation, hearing the end result as this ineffable swirl of extrasensory stimuli is a hell of a lot more immersive. Losing track of where reverb ends and new chords begin, sinking into the blurred interplay of bass and keyboards, finding all the richness in the nuances of Keenan’s clear-toned enunciations — it’s enough to promote the idea that psychedelia doesn’t even need hallucinogenics to turn your mind around when insinuations of the out-there can sneak through the notes and inspire visions you never knew you had”.
If you like the sound of Broadcast’s debut album, I would recommend people buy it on vinyl. If you need some more convincing, this is what AllMusic wrote in their review for The Noise Made by People:
“After being mired in the studio for nearly three years, Broadcast returned with their first proper full-length album, The Noise Made by People, a collection of more shimmering, weightless pop that is nostalgic for yesterday's visions of the future but remains on the cutting edge of contemporary music. Where their early singles (collected on 1997's Work and Non-Work) painted small, quaint portraits of their retro-futurism, The Noise Made by People delivers their sound in widescreen, filmic grandeur. Richly layered yet airy pieces like the album bookends, "Long Was the Year" and "Dead the Long Year," seamlessly blend symphonic, electronic, and pop elements into smoky, evocative epics, while synth-based interludes such as "Minus One" and "The Tower of Our Tuning" present Broadcast's more detached, scientific side. Likewise, Trish Keenan's air-conditioned vocals sometime suggest a robotized Sandie Shaw or Cilla Black, but her humanity peeks out on "Come on Let's Go" and "Papercuts." "Echo's Answer" and "Until Then" are two of the other highlights from the album, which despite all of its chilly unearthliness, is a noise made by (very talented) people”.
I am going to leave it there. I think Come On Let's Go – the album’s second single – is the highlight…though other people might have their own impressions. The Noise Made by People is a sensational album that is so fascinating and strong (Pitchfork observed, in their review: “Though it's slightly disconcerting to hear sounds like this without being floored by a sense of daring and originality, it's a testament to the explosion of genre-bending music that was the underground's biggest artistic accomplishment in the 1990's. Broadcast one-ups the avant leanings of most of these juxtaposition-experimenting acts by making these advances work in the context of memorable pop songs). If you are not aware of The Noise Made by People, then go and get a copy and…
ABSORB the magic and mystery.