Ghost Box
I pride myself upon being slow on the uptake, bringing up the rear, last to catch on. As the uber-bloggers (Blissblog, k-punk) move away from their focus upon hauntology, I start to pay attention. In truth, I’d downloaded a couple of Belbury Poly albums a few months back and they’d sat mostly ignored in iTunes. When I did play them, I found them almost painfully self-conscious, overloaded with all those signifiers that so enthused the aforementioned writers. However, as I’ve become more puzzled with my life I’ve begun listening to some different music.
Belbury Poly gradually knitted into some kind of sense, so I finally opted to buy three Ghost Box albums to investigate further. (Note to RIAA/the music industry: I never would have made these purchases if I hadn’t had the opportunity to listen at length before buying.) I’m not going to comment on the music here, but the packaging. I ordered the CDs via the Ghost Box website and had only seen the booklets reproduced in The Wire. They’re gorgeous pieces of design: self-conscious and resonant in equal parts, courtesy of the hugely talented Julian House who’s done so much wonderful work for Intro:
I hadn’t seen the physical packaging before, but 110% expected to receive three covetable card digipaks. Imagine my disappointment when, upon opening the bubble-wrapped envelope, I found three standard plastic jewel cases:
When stacked together, as above, there’s some suggestion of a newly minted ’60s modernist housing project. But mostly the inability for this packaging to age more or less gracefully, unlike the music it contains which is so deliberately refracted through the prism of time, is a major let-down. Even the paper stock of the booklets is, to my mind, too glossy for its purpose. I wonder whether initial runs of these albums did come in digipak form.
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