Continuity announcers’ reassuring tones can become nightmare narrators when displaced

Evidence

The album sounds like an electro/Rave version of The Disintegration Loops, except what was disintegrating here was a moment in British broadcasting history. The loose concept behind the album was a dead television studio, and what’s crucial to its unnerving allure is the presence of former Thames TV continuity announcer Phillip Elsmore. There’s a lunatic calm about the way that Elsmore reading Baron Mordant’s Nonsense (best heard in its own right on his collaboration with Ekoplekz, eMMplekz). Listening to Dead Air is like stumbling into an abandoned museum 200 years into the future where old Rave tracks play on an endless loop, degrading, becoming more contaminated with each repetition; or like being stranded in deep space, picking up fading radio signals from a far distant earth to which you will never return; or like memory itself re-imagined as an oneiric television studio, where fondly recalled continuity announcers, drifting in and out of audibility, narrate your nightmares in reassuring tones. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 346