Isolated Community - Pit Full of Ghosts (2023)

See Blue Audio: ambient / electronic / beatless / cinematic / downtempo / eclectic / introspective… Shade rather than light...

'Pit Full of Ghosts' – Isolated Community (SBA #042)

See Blue Audio marked the winter solstice and closing of 2021 with ‘Cold Sleet on Old Slate’ by Isolated Community, an accomplished, powerful and eloquent soundtrack to the changing seasons. This time around, the label has invited the duo of Rachael Talbot Dunn and Richard Dunn from Newcastle upon Tyne to present another winter offering as the opening release of 2023, and once again the theme is ghosts and spirits. On ‘Pit Full of Ghosts’, the forty-second release on See Blue Audio, they journey into lonely and forgotten places, and invoke the spirits that inhabit these netherworlds to create music with a profoundly tangible sense of something otherworldly.

After ‘Cold Sleet on Old Slate’ Isolated Community released the ‘Farmhouse Brothel’ album on their own Northumberland Audio Capture imprint. Their creative output was subsequently curtailed by a period of illness, but this also served as an occasion for introspection and rediscovery from which new music was born. ‘Pit Full of Ghosts’ is a collection of seven tracks largely inspired by the fever dreams and insomnia experienced during this recent period of illness, which often triggered long forgotten memories. This coincided with the changing seasons and the natural response to seek withdrawal from the harsh rhythms of life during winter.

As health returned and contact with the outside world was established again, a walking trip to Cateran Hole in Northumberland provided ghostly inspiration. As the North Sea and windswept landscapes of North East England created the backdrop for ‘Cold Sleet on Old Slate’, so the cave-like Cateran Hole, surrounded by deserted moorland, set the mood for ‘Pit Full of Ghosts’. With its tales of lost explorers and supernatural folklore, it had a sense of hauntology that captured the experience of emerging from the shadows.

‘Connections That Exist’ begins this new collection in dramatic style with a distorted howling wind and the crackle of static counterbalanced by quivering strings and bursts of electronic hail. The path is laid as we descend into the pit accompanied by the disembodied voices and cascading harmonies of ‘Into the Mirror’ followed by ‘Old Light’ with its sampled dialogue, industrial-like pulse and melancholy overtones.

Memory is central to the aesthetic of ‘Pit Full of Ghosts’, where each track transports the listener to another time and place. Fragments of speech, field recordings, and sounds from earlier eras populate the predominately beatless musical landscape adding an undercurrent of tension, which can pass from the playful to the sinister with apparent ease. ‘Childhood Memory’ evokes bittersweet feelings of watching old homemade movies of the person you once were, while ‘A Glimpse of Something Hidden’ captures the feeling of unease experienced during illness and is constructed entirely from manipulated samples of the artists’ own voices. ‘Sightless Windows’ continues this theme with its portrayal of the claustrophobic sound of being trapped inside your own head, unable to form rational thoughts, leading to insomnia and spiralling anxiety.

The title track concludes ‘Pit Full of Ghosts’ and we are deep inside the secret domain of the pit. Nothing is ever quite what it seems, however, and droplets of musical light are punctuated by dreamlike analogue synths that provide a glimmer of hope and entry to another world. As healing follows pain and spring follows winter, so life can reawaken, and ghosts finally find peace. Let Isolated Community be your guide.