Summoning Radiophonic Hounds: The Dark Outside and Bibliotapes Interview

The Dark Outside’s Stuart McLean talks to Stewart Gardiner about avoiding digital, hollowing out old books and his new soundtracks-for-books cassette label

Running through the forest as if in a recurring childhood dream. What’s after me I do not know. It remains unseen, yet sickeningly felt. I must force myself to keep moving, afraid that my legs will stop working at any moment. It’s behind me always now, working its way closer.

I used to say that I was disappointed upon learning that magical wardrobes didn’t actually exist. Now that I’ve found one – and opened it – well, my only wish is that it be confined once more to the pages of a book. In my search for fictional objects of power made manifest in this reality, I turned to cassette labels The Dark Outside and Bibliotapes. They are portals into other worlds or at least offer the means to momentarily lift the veil and see beyond. It was in fact Ioan Morris’s soundtrack to an imaginary incarnation of CS Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew that led me to the wardrobe, its sonic landscape a secret cartography. I listened too deeply and now fear that I am lost.

The following interview was quite possibly conducted on the threshold between fiction and reality.

Am I speaking to The Dark Outside? Please step into the light and introduce yourself.

My name is Stuart McLean and I’m responsible for bringing The Dark Outside to the forest.

The Dark Outside label mission statement begins with the actually-very-appealing words: “I know it’s not the way to run a music label.” Can you talk about your approach to running a label and how it differs to that of others?

Originally the label came about from a discussion with Ben (Soundhog) in a forest during the 2015 Dark Outside when we realised that most of what we were hearing (Jon Brooks, Pye Corner Audio, Handspan etc.) was just too good for people never to get a chance to hear. It took three years with various outside factors getting in the way – like spending the money required to release one, being skint, ill health and whatnot.

There’s very little or no promotion whatsoever, barring a Twitter account and a mailing list, no Facebook presence and a desire to stay in the background away from any attention. It’s a cassette tape, no digital – I only ever wanted it to be on tape. Adding digital may cause headaches for the artists who want to release it elsewhere. Although you can still buy the Skull Friday double album on Bandcamp as all proceeds go to Macmillan.

Back to not running a label. With vinyl the turnaround can be up to four or more months. With tape I can have it ready for release in under two weeks. Release dates are dictated by the local printers in Newton Stewart as the day I pick the covers and labels up is usually release day. There’s no promo either, no magazine reviews – a bit daft as there’s no set release dates (the Correlations one in Electronic Sound was down to Neil Correlations himself).

How did the Pye Corner Audio release come about? I’ve made peace with the fact that I will never hear the PCA cassette on TDO. Yet I consider it more a mythic object that mere album, so I can dream of it rather than feel disappointed. Would you consider that the ephemeral nature of these releases – the fact that they cannot be listened to indefinitely for fear of the tape deteriorating and only by a small number of people – gives them an aura of otherness?

Martin has recorded something for every Dark Outside broadcast – the title Five Years in the Dark referencing the five tracks over five years. The tracks on the tape were the tracks broadcast. As for not being able to listen to them indefinitely – I have tapes that are almost 40 years old that still play – Ben (Soundhog) has way more tapes and some that are far older that still play fine.

TDO 002 by Handspan is a soundtrack to the book The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. How did that come about? It must have been an exciting idea to hear or generate.

Rob sent the “Theme for The Dark is Rising” back in 2015 for that year’s broadcast. It was an instant favourite. I cheekily asked if he had more and he said he was working on a soundtrack album for a book. It took three years for him to learn how to play some of the instruments on it and finish it, but it was well worth the wait.

I’m assuming that The Dark is Rising release gave you the idea for starting another label to release soundtracks for books on tapes? Or did the idea predate Handspan’s album? At what point did you think it should be its own label?

Soundtracks for books seemed like a no brainer – Neil (Audio Obscura) emailed to say just that as well. The interest in Handspan’s soundtrack was enough for me to ask around to see if anyone was interested in doing one.

It seems to me, looking in from the outside, that Bibliotapes came together rather quickly. Is that the case?

The idea came very quickly, as did the logo and the overall design. Soundtracks take time to compose and record so I was prepared to wait.

How do you commission works for Bibliotapes? Do artists pitch books to you?

So far the only thing I’ve asked was if anyone fancied recording a soundtrack for a favourite book of theirs. It’s not so much a pitch but more a case of something they’d been working on and hadn’t finished or something they’d always wanted to do.

Do the musical approaches differ depending on the books?

Charlie Bridgen’s liner notes for The Dark is Rising asked the question “What if…” and what I’m running with is that idea. What if there was a soundtrack? So far I’ve heard two for books aimed at a similar audience and one other. Handspan and Ioan took different approaches to what could have been very similarly styled pieces. The Dark is Rising has music mentioned throughout and captures that very, very old folk melodies and instruments meets synths eerily well. The Magician’s Nephew is different in approach and sounds like it should have been a soundtrack for a Japanese animated version circa 1985-ish. Or at least that how my ears hear it. The next one is entirely different.

One of the beautiful things about this concept is that no text is off limits. They’re not adaptations, so copyright presumably doesn’t apply and neither does the notion of something being unfilmable or untranslatable. Is it a freeing concept? Are there any associated difficulties?

The soundtrack is entirely in the hands of the composer who chooses that particular book. I leave it all in their capable hands without interfering. The next one almost had a cover that you would have to look twice at to see if it used the original. That might have taken it a step too far. So far it’s been very straightforward.

Are there any unfilmable books you’d like to release soundtracks to? I’m obviously hoping for JG Ballard’s Concrete Island at some point…

I’d like to hear a period piece – say Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness – in the style of the era it’s set in. I’d love someone to tackle Warren Ellis’s Crooked Little Vein if only to hear how they do the Godzilla bukkake or scrotal saline infusion parts.

The Magician’s Nephew is the origin story of Narnia and therefore feels like the perfect first release for Bibliotapes, the entry point into a new world. How did this become the first album and what drew Ioan Morris to the project?

Ioan bought a copy of Handspan’s Dark is Rising and got in touch via Twitter. (He has previously soundtracked a lot of Doctor Who dramatisations.) Initially Audio Obscura was toying with doing Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (he’s now doing something else). I literally said, pick a book and give it a soundtrack (anything goes – even mariachi). That’s basically it.

You’ve said that The Magician’s Nephew is “done like the soundtracks for 80s animations and relies heavily on FM synthesis.” Can you expand on this?

From Ioan: “The starting point was what the Radiophonic Workshop had in use around 1983/84 (specifically DX-7, PPG Wave and Elka Synthex) and the other main influence was Joe Hisaishi’s work for the early films of Studio Ghibli, especially the Nausicaa image album.”

How important is the design to The Dark Outside and Bibliotapes? Your covers convey an aesthetic that has a lot of appeal. Old Pelican and Penguin paperbacks are beautifully evoked with Bibliotapes and the paperback-sized cases you’ve gone for is a lovely touch.

The covers initially for the TDO tapes were based on the old BBC Cassettes releases with the Dark Outside logo in the centre. This has changed from using variations on that logo to artwork provided by the artists themselves – means less work for me!

Bibliotapes was a bit different – I had an idea about making them to sit in bookcases next to books and looking a bit like the 60s Pelican releases. I draw the line at hollowing out old books again. I did that for a limited edition Frenchbloke and Son release on Seed Records years ago. A truly thankless task and I don’t even have a copy.

I remembered seeing some tape cases similar in size to DVD cases – some were literally just large rigid plastic cases – that was scrapped as I didn’t fancy their chances of making their way through the postal system in one piece. Then there were the old rave tapes cases – thick plastic ones, but the price alone was almost £4 each and the postage would have been two to three times due to its thickness.

I bought one case along with an order for a previous TDO release which meant I could mock one up and was delighted to see it was almost the same size as a Penguin paperback.

What’s next on Bibliotapes?

Ruper Lally’s soundtrack for The Day of the Triffids which is out in the next few weeks or whenever the printer gets in touch.

darkoutside.co.uk

bibliotapes.co.uk