Description
The duo’s raison d’etre is to trawl through old film archives – those of the GPO Film Unit seem to be a favourite – in search of snippets of voices to set to music. It seems a pretty arcane pursuit, but it’s without precedent or in isolation. As the album plays, listeners with long memories may find themselves recalling a period in the mid-80s when it was briefly held that the dernier cri in forward-thinking rock and pop music was to overlay your song with sampled snatches of film dialogue: the era of Big Audio Dynamite, Paul Hardcastle, and Steinski and Mass Media and Tackhead’s experiments on the On-U Sound label, and of Colourbox, is occasionally and presumably unconsciously evoked by Inform-Educate-Entertain, not least on Signal 30, which samples a variety of aged US road safety films over raging guitars.
