The Ministry of Lies
"Interview with Jim Jupps of Belbury Poly"
This interview was originally conducted via email for an article written for Emerson College's Five Cent Sound Music Magazine. Many thanks to Jupps, Julian House and Ghost Box for their time and support.
Q: I've heard bits of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, library music, and old film scores in the music of the Ghost Box label. What other material do you draw on for your music? (Ghost Box in general, or your work with the Belbury Poly).
A: Belbury Poly draws strongly on library and soundtrack music but with TV soundtracks as a particular influence. British folk music is also important to me. Glam and prog to some extent also. In general Ghost Box artists draw on a variety of influences, early electronic music, folk, psychedelia, library & soundtrack. Its not stuff from any particular time period, but we imagine a kind of all-at-once world spanning from the mid sixties to the mid eighties with occasional anachronistic ideas bleeding through from the present day.
Q: To what end do you draw from this material? What's the purpose, if any?
A: There's not so much of a deliberate purpose here, its just that our artists share a sensibility for a timeless parallel world, of maybe an imaginary past. We use the label to tie all these influences and styles together to give the whole thing a sense of narrative and continuity.
Q: Is the idea of a physical release central to the ethos of the label? If so, why?
A: Physical release have always been most important to us. We feel that the the design and imagery that goes into each release gives it more context than the music alone can give. I often here purists say "Isn't it just about the music ?" or "If its good shouldn't it be able to stand alone ?". We've always disagreed with this and feel strongly that instrumental music in particular is always enhanced by a visual setting, especially given that many of our artists remain fairly anonymous and some are only studio based.
Q: How does collaboration with outside projects fit into the larger narrative of Ghost Box?
A: Our series of singles (Study Series & Other Voices) have provided a kind of side line to the label where we can work with other artists, whose work we love but may not quite fit into the Ghost Box world. Or simply that they have other label commitments. The short form of the single and the process of collaboration with artists outside our immediate circle is very satisfying. Its a way to experiment and take more chances than we could with albums alone. Its sometimes a nice way to introduce new artists to our label too.
Q: Was the creation of Ghost Box a primarily logistical endeavor or is there an artistic reason for putting together all of these projects?
A: Julian House and I started the label purely as an outlet for our own musical projects at the time. Musically we worked in very different ways from each other, but we always new we had a lot of interests and influences in common and saw a way that a label could be a very neat visual representation of our work, given that we had no time or interest in being performing artists and were happy to stay anonymous. It was at a time before the dominance of downloads and way before streaming was possible, so initially it was a website to just sell a few burn to order CDRs to anyone who might be interested. We always envisaged that the label itself would have equal billing with the artist's name and that our artists would remain fairly anonymous. It grew from there and adapted as we started to work with more people. But the original aesthetic and identity is still there as the defining feature of the label.