The Delaware Road: Black Propaganda

Buried Treasure

A book, a CD, a crackle, a cackle.

It’s an undialled radio… buzz… Echoes a little of 2000AD’s Zenith… perhaps even the first few episodes of Hellboy… this is England Calling, The Delaware Road… a little graphic play, beautifully illustrated…. A Black Mass… bombers descending… a magickal world of… crackle… fizz… and yet…

The thing about The Delaware Road is their dedication to their task, to the legend.  

This is from them:

Two musical pioneers create the soundtrack to 1960s Britain producing electronic themes for television and radio. They discover a recording that leads to a startling revelation about their employer. Obsessed by the occult nature of the tapes they conduct a studio ritual that will alter their lives forever.

But the legend expands, out and in, the Black Propaganda book drags them back to World War II, to experiments in dark magick and this fits perfectly with their overall theme, because the 1960s were the 1940s, or at least the outer edges of the ’40s, the ’40s that were immersed in myth and magic.  The occult shenanigans of The Stones, The Doors, the Whoever were consciously looking back as much as they were looking forward; that free love existed already in the sex cults of the ’30s and ’40s, that rhythmic drone was kicking around the temples of Crowley long before George picked up a bongo.

The Golden Dawn and OTO were well established by the 1940s and perhaps on the periphery of the government, the establishment. They were occult but they were also usual. The book recognizes this; it seems likely that occult ritual might have been used to help fight the dark forces of Nazism. The bullshit Bulldog Blighty was never going to be enough against the thunder and lightning of Germany and everyone knew it; the collective amnesia of that, in the light of propaganda and wartime film

Britain has always struggled to let go of its mythology and The Delaware Road project understands that. The music on the CD spans everything from Ghost Box occult jingles (for psychic TV stations) to astral lounge jazz through folk and fog and ambient chatter… buzzzzz…. crackle… except there’s very actually little fog; this isn’t one of those compilations where everything turns grey and full of drone. These tracks are resolutely clean, the production values are very high and in many cases would easily pass muster as library music or gentle psychedelia from 1967.

Everything feels very real and it’s an illusion that is maintained throughout; no one dips away, even the likes of Howlround sound like they could have been wrenched from the Radiophonic Workshop, whereas the tight-looseness and flow (bear with me here) of Revbjelde seems at times formed out of 1960s session musicians playing inside a Masonic temple.

The Rowan Amber Mill take things down a beautifully composed, vaguely Wicker Man route, seeing another twist in the magical landscape, whereas Asterion, whose drum machines are the only slightly uchronic step here, surround themselves with an early ’70s scifi-jazz fugue (in contrast to the gently ceremonial, 1960s feel of Tongues of Fire), giving a nod to the other kind of Black Magic. Dolly Dolly is also here and he makes a lot of sense in this context as a master of ceremonies, even if he takes this role via his own releases rather than his contribution to this one… he also appears at the back of the book, speaking in bendy tongues, all occult surrealism and Britpulp fervour. He’s a man who often seems as if he’s been somehow displaced in time, or rather as if he could reasonably exist in any time, but has, on this occasion, flashed into life via an explosion in 1942, when he was working on some third-wave Dadaist cut-ups in a secret underground laboratory.

No one drops the ball. There’s a real sense of control here, across the whole compilation; in the same way that Ivo put together This Mortal Coil so aspects sounded different, but always the same, then so too does this compilation; these tracks belong together, everyone seems to be playing along.

-Loki-