So, I finally got to hear The Séance at Hobs Lane, by Mount Vernon Arts Lab, and I’m very, very impressed. The album was originally released in 2001 on Via Satellite and is now reissued by Ghost Box (the label Simon Reynolds astutely described in 2005 as “serious audio-madeleine bizniz”) which is absolutely the best place for it.

Séance is remarkable not least for combining so many disparate elements — noise electronica, found sound / field recordings, strings and woodwind — into such a distinctive and coherent whole. Hobgoblins, remixed by the late Jhon Balance does an excellent job of realising the kind of lopsided racket I was groping after in my earlier remarks on Steampunk music. Several of the others recall, to various degrees, The Radiophonic Workshop, Fennesz, Biosphere, Quatermass, early proggish Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, Smallfilms, Joe Meek and certain Harry Partch excursions. The closing track, the fourteen minutes of Percy Topliss sent me scrambling for my CD of Max Roach and Anthony Braxton’s Birth and Rebirth, of all things, to determine whether the resemblance I thought I found there was anything but imaginary. As it turns out, it wasn’t in the least imaginary: if you were to take the first track of that record and replace Roach’s hyperactive drum barrage with a multi-layered electronic noise barrage. Despite the cosmopolitan associations that Séance evokes, the totality is uniquely and distinctly site-specific, conjuring up a crepescular Britain of the late fifties or very early sixties that never quite existed.

I’ve been trying to chase up whatever information I can find about Drew Mulholland, and I have to report that many of the URLs scattered about the place are defunct. There’s a discography at discogs.com, however, though I can’t speak for its completeness; there’s a tiny minisite, which amounts to little more than an anecdote and a clutch of grainy gifs of ancient recording equipment at Ochre, one of the several labels that MVAL has passed through. There is a Drew Mulholland interview by Mark Pilkington at Fortean Times, and there is the following, which is the whole text (as far as I can make out) from the Mount Vernon Astral Temple website:

anti gravity, the toplis hut,walking the sigil, sealing wax, black noise, alchemical markings at hobbs end, the sherrifmuir atlantic wall,white chocolate cybermen,paul bonneau, strange attractor,fortune green south railway station, “N”,20ft concrete arrows on braid fell, vatican no.1 incense, experimental tourism, 27001 coincidences, the 1969 ready reckoner, netley military hospital,gigantor, japanoise, the hackney homunculus, building a golem, sapphire and steel, the committee, ff browns, “the great bear”, bushels, pecks and roods, algorhythmic psychogeography, retrostationary, mighty antar, “Sumer is Icummen in”, cOmpLete CoNtrOl, Collecting the ashes of The Wicker Man @ Burrowhead, Jacques Vache, Arthur Cravan, maps becoming time machines, Strange Attractor, saint peters seminary@ cardross, urban trespass, charles dodgson, benediction.

Make of that what you will, shall be the whole of the Law. Apparently.

My researches also revealed that I missed seeing MVAL at Strange Attractor’s Megalithomania event in 2002, which I attended but left before any of the musical contributions — why on earth did I do that?

See also:
Music Is Dead! Long Live Hauntology! – k-punk’s review of Seance at FACT magazine.
MVAL at MySpace (with sound clips)
Glasgwegian Bedroom Beethovens features a long-ish exerpt from a short documentary about Mulholland’s Via Satellite label.
Spirit of Preservation, Simon Reynolds’ appreciation of Ghost Box at frieze.com