roj

The Transactional Dharma of Roj

Each Ghost Box release is becoming quite an event for a growing number of folks nowadays, keen to peek through the looking glass into their queerly quaint miniature-village world of psychedelia. The latest trip was invented by Roj Stevens, a former member of close Ghost Box associates Broadcast, and a fellow native of that sprawling grey and green mid-section of England that inspires much of the Ghost Box sound and aesthetic. This release also benefits from an accompanying text by writer Ken Hollings, whose 'Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century, 1947-1959' touches a subject close to Ghost Box's heart, as they say: "Hollings collaborated extensively in the concept and hit upon the perfect textual environment of snappy, far out aphorisms. As if the reality tampering tape experiments of Burroughs and Gysin were neatly delivered by Marsall McLuhan. This album imagines a kind of cultural and psychic revolution exploding in the rigid confines of a small English town." Roj's sound is debted to the sci-fi influences of a bygone era, utilising alien analog tones, ferric-affected percussion and an assortment of disembodied voices. It's these vocals that imbue the project with its trippiest feeling of nostalgia, like the lady on 'Clear Channels' or the gentleman of 'A Beginning Word' flooding back memories of turning the huge knob of my gran's radio and picking up foreign voices out of the ether from waves of static and all manner of frequencies in between. Percussion is integral to much of the project too, relying on hypnotic repetition to sync us into his state of mind, like the village fete dream sequence drums of 'Go Without Me', exotic lounge affair of 'Bongo Workout' or rippling xylophonics of 'Modified apparatus test'. 'The Dharma Of Roj' will definitely strike a poignant chord with anyone who grew up in the early 80's or before, and comes highly recommended to anyone with a penchant for nostalgia or watching ITV4 at 3am on valium. Amazing.