The owner of London-based Ghost Box Records Jim Jupp/Wikimedia commons
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
Recorded by the owner of London-based Ghost Box Records Jim Jupp, the witty chamber etudes of this song are based on the principles of musical hauntology, which was a pleasantly shimmering pastime in the second half of the noughties. Hauntology posits the existence of some parallel worlds of human memory and matches them with corresponding ghostly sounds on the verge of auditory hallucination. In fact, the word ‘Belbury’ in the band’s name is a fictional toponym from C.S. Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength.
In ‘Goat Foot’, these auditory hallucinations are inspired by the atmosphere of an oriental bazaar, and the Moog synthesizer solo here is, of course, designed by nature itself to imitate the bustle of shoppers around carpets. The title of the instrumental composition also suggests different meanings: the song is either about a plant known as Ipomoea cairica, or it’s dedicated to actual goats’ feet cooked the oriental way. Whatever the case may be, both versions take us directly to the East.