Attic conversions with cryptic Midlander
Who They?
Shropshire tinkerer Alexander McCloughlin, apparently. “After my mum died, I found a large cardboard box in her loft, full of books and magazines about the paranormal,” he claims. “They didn’t belong to her or my dad, so I don’t know where they came from. There was a page from a catalogue and it had a cheap version of the old View-Master 3D photo viewer, made by a company called Aux Luna. They don’t exist anymore, so I used the name and their logo for my project.”
Why Aux Luna?
There are now three Aux Luna albums, with McCloughlin layering loops, toy instruments and fizzing ambience over extracts from dusty analogue tapes also discovered in said box. These tapes, which were simply labelled “Hannah” when he found them, contained disintegrating, mono recordings of unidentified guitar and hissy piano recitals.
“Some of the magazines in the box had the name ‘Shepherd’ written on them and I thought that may have been written by the newsagent to reserve them,” he continues. “So I assume Hannah was the daughter of someone called Shepherd who used to buy these magazines. Hannah Shepherd? I’ve searched online, but never found a likely candidate.”
Tell Us More…
New album ‘British Cryptids’ also incorporates plummy-voiced snippets from what purports to be a previously unbroadcast 1974 schools TV series of the same title. They’re on YouTube, for anyone seized by curiosity regarding the “Yorkshire Yeti” or the “Hereford Twiggywitch”. The album makes for a wonderfully disquieting experience, redolent of both windswept, haunted heaths and bum-numbing school halls haunted by the spectres of long-lost Spam fritters. But McCloughlin remains modest. “No matter how I subsequently develop the music, it’s forever inspired and haunted by Hannah,” he concedes. “Whoever she was…”
‘British Cryptids’ is out on Whinny Moor
