Correction: This post has been amended to correctly reflect that Jonny Trunk is not an alias of Jon Brooks. Trunk nonetheless runs the excellent Trunk label and hosts a weekly show on Resonance FM.
Jon Brooks plays not just under his own name but also under a number of aliases—including D.D. Denham and now Georges Vert. But he’s perhaps most famous as the Advisory Circle, one of the spiders crawling in the cobwebs of British label Ghost Box. The acts on Ghost Box all share similar preoccupations, which are, according to the label’s Wikipedia page, “music for schools, cosmic horror stories, library music, English surrealism, and the dark side of psychedelia.” Not to mention science fiction, owls, Krautrock, folk music, and midcentury modernism.
When he’s not working as the Advisory Circle for Ghost Box, Brooks puts out albums (which you can stream for free) under other guises on his label Café Kaput. Occasionally he’ll also release mixes, and the one he dropped last Thursday is spectacular—it’s especially well suited for the hours when the day is winding down. On Summer Triangles, Brooks weaves together disparate genres that all seem to echo the stylistic touchstones of Ghost Box and Brooks’s other projects. For example, the opening track is “Morgenspaziergang” by Kraftwerk, an atypically folksy and British-sounding track by the otherwise robotic synth-pop group. Harold Budd’s “Juno” could have come from Pharoah Sanders’s late-60s/early-70s jazz albums, and a track by Pye Corner Audio, while clearly contemporary techno, also recalls early industrial music by the likes of Cabaret Voltaire. The biggest revelation is a beautiful ambient piece by Benjamin Dauer, whose name was new to me. Check out the mellow-to-mildly-danceable mix after the jump. (The Mixcloud player lists tracks as they play, something I actually like, and makes it extremely difficult to skip forward—also a plus in my book.)