Broadcast

Tender Buttons (2005)

With Tender Buttons, Broadcast shed their rhythm section entirely — just Trish Keenan and James Cargill, using synthesisers, drum machines, and tape loops to construct an electronic landscape that sounds less like pop music than library music recorded by aliens. 'Tears in the Typing Pool' achieves something remarkable: a song with a hook, built entirely from synthesiser tones and drum machine patterns that nonetheless carries the emotional weight of a personal lyric. The album distilled Broadcast's entire aesthetic into its essential components and influenced the wave of UK electronic music that followed, from Ghost Box Records to Panda Bear's studio approach.

Sleeve notes

Tender Buttons · 2005

Trish Keenan and James Cargill had one of the most specific creative projects in British music: a sustained, formally rigorous investigation of the moment when pop music was becoming self-conscious about being pop music — late sixties and early seventies Britain, library music, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the avant-garde getting into mainstream broadcast. Their records sounded like artifacts of that period that had been discovered and carefully restored, except that Keenan's voice was too present, too alive, to be a simulacrum.

Ha Ha Sound (2003), Tender Buttons (2005), Berberian Sound Studio (the score for Peter Strickland's film, 2012) — each advanced a project of radical nostalgia, using vintage synthesis and tape manipulation as compositional materials rather than as costume. Keenan's death from H1N1 pneumonia in January 2011 ended the band at the point where it was still becoming. Berberian Sound Studio, released posthumously, remains one of the most unsettling and beautiful things in the electronic-adjacent British catalog.