Death and Vanilla: A Flicker Of Hope

Something of a best-kept secret, with her dazzling new album ‘Awake But Always Dreaming’ Hannah Peel is a star on the rise. We feel the increasing warmth of that limelight…

We’ve had 10 years of wonderful music and fabulous visuals from those genre-defining folk at Ghost Box Records and we’re popping corks with label co-founders Jim Jupp and Julian House to mark the occasion. Stand by for stuff about synths, sci-fi, Bagpuss, electromagnetic fields, alchemists, William Burroughs and haunted dancefloors

There was no single unifying event for the formative UK electronica scene, no point when something suddenly clicked, no precise year zero moment. But there was a bunch of like-minded souls beavering away in what they thought was their own little void, unaware there were others just like them all over the country. We talk to seven of the artists featured on the ’Close To The Noise Floor’ box set and get their big bang stories

They pooled their gear to record their first singles, which they then released on their own labels. Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, old friends from the town of port Glasgow on the Clyde, were the original bedroom producers and key players in the nascent diy electronic scene of the late 1970s. And they didn’t own a single synth between them

A true electronic pioneer, Italian composer Doris Norton tells us about her prog rock beginnings, Apple-sponsored early solo work, IBM experiments and 90s dancefloor bangers…