#spell blanket

Broadcast was influenced to an outsized degree by one obscure album, the self-titled and only release from the United States of America in 1968. That album brims with the exuberance of some young, newly minted electronic music obsessives, several of whom later made careers as academic composers, avant-garde musicians, or sound artists working in media. That early album is marked by both beauty and no small share of clowning — electronics could be sonically eerie, but they could just as easily generate mechanistic slide whistles or burps.

Broadcast retained the United States of America’s sense of awe and play with sound, though they streamlined this approach through disciplined musicianship as well as a number of stylish signatures, including Keenan’s finely threaded vocals, James Cargill’s forceful drumming, a tendency to write in waltz time (it works) and sometimes an overdriven organ. In place of silliness, Broadcast often inserted something more aloof, but there is not a song in their catalog where they aren’t clearly reveling in sonic atmospheres, just as the United States of America had done. Broadcast’s shows were deeply immersive experiences, as complete and convincing a gesamntkunstwerk as I’ve ever seen from a rock band.

In the years before she died, Keenan kept a kind of sonic diary via MiniDisc, a format which in the 2000s enjoyed a brief moment as a medium of choice for sharing larger files. The entries she made ranged from grainy snippets of vocal melodies to relatively polished song demos recorded with Cargill and others, advanced drafts that might have become songs on a subsequent Broadcast album. As Spell Blanket contains 36 tracks, it is difficult to know which of these sketches were bound for release and which were only fleeting ideas. (Cargill must have endured an emotionally enormous task in curating this material). But a track like “Follow the Light” suggests what might have been. On that recording, Keenan sings a haunting, minor-key melody in gorgeous counterpoint to two organ lines, one high and one low, both swimming in reverb in a way that exemplifies the group’s métier of crafting sonic worlds. “The Games You Play,” with its motorik drums and clouds of recorder grot pitted against the vocals, likewise sounds almost finished. On the other hand, “The Song Before the Song Comes Out” seems to be Keenan sketching a possibility with her voice and whatever device she had at hand. This kind of intimacy is evident on a number of the collection’s tracks.

There will be a final Broadcast album later this year, a recreation by Cargill using the fragments Keenan left behind. In the meantime, we have Spell Blanket, a mostly unexpurgated view inside the process of building worlds in sound, at the sort of unfinished stage that the band’s albums ardently never revealed when they were together.