Spotted in The Wire magazine recently - Fonolith Records - tick all the boxes for Fortean-themed music. An extract from the article:
Fonolith Records is where one man's obsession with occult folklore and vintage technology is recorded into dark electronic journals. Blackpool artist Neil Scrivin began the label in 2016 as a way to release music without restriction. "I'd been lucky enough to have had a few releases on Skam Records," Scrivin says. "But it had become a slow process, and creatively I was suffering from it.” On Fonolith, he regularly releases several projects a year under a cast of pseudonyms. There's Phono Ghosts, a project using the cassette tape to capture the sound of dreams, and Hyperlink Dream Sync, a collaborative effort between Scrivin and Eric Sferro that explores the digital big bang of floppy discs, AOL and CD-ROMs. Material under his own name is more wide-ranging, some of it recorded in the 2000s. His newest solo project The Night Monitor is a sonic research voyage through Scrivin's interest in the paranormal.
In the 1970s and 80s when paranormal media was booming like never before, a young Scrivin was exposed to curious magazines such as The Unexplained, Usborne's World Of The Unknown books and Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World television series. He consumed it all voraciously and remembers "being scared as a kid by things like the infamous Newby Church ghost monk photo, images of spontaneous human combustion or poltergeist activity and the creepiness of the alien encounters illustrated in The Unexplained. In fact, all these things still inform my creative mind today."
Through The Night Monitor, he transforms these early fascinations into albums based around specific cases of paranormal activity. The music hints at other artists - a whisper of Tangerine Dream, echoes of John Carpenter, etc. One element wraps it all together in the form of retrofuturistic synths that fuzz like an old TV playing an 80s murder mystery drama.
Check them out on Bandcamp:
https://fonolith.bandcamp.com
Instagram:
https://instagram.com/fonolith.records?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
