PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING EVEREST

More music should be like this, well maybe not should be like it, rather there should just be more existing music out there that is similar to this. Failing that, the two Londoners behind Public Service Broadcasting could just continue making the lovely music they already make. Then we'll be fine.

What these guys do, and have done since before the release of their first EP, EP One, in 2010, is take old recordings of many kinds - public information films, old propaganda and other archive footage/recordings - and set them to music. On paper, or in theory, it doesn't sound great, but in practice and in your ears it sounds rather lovely indeed. Indeed, their aim is to "teach the lessons of the past through the music of the future" which is a lot less educational and a lot more fun and beautiful sounding than you'd imagine.

Their newest song, released today 12th November 2012, is called 'Everest' and as you might guess it includes samples from archive recordings of a little film about Mount Everest. Before it was called Mount Everest it known simply as 'Peak 15' (see, I've learned something from it). Have a listen to the lovely sounds below:

Set to banjos and all sorts of other stringed instruments, to the backing beat of a relentless and inoffensively tinny drum kit, the song gallops along in an indie-instrumental kind of way without a hitch and summons a wonderfully cartoony soundscape of the first men to climb Everest in whatever year it was (didn't remember that bit, sorry), with blizzards made of scrunched up paper whirling around and little men cut from construction paper gradually etching their path up the side of the jagged mountain. So, if this song isn't anything else, it's evocative and imagination-inducing.

A bit of synth doesn't go amiss and actually provides the song's main hook in a cyclical melody that acts like an aural drug made expressly for dancing, head-bopping and otherwise toe-tapping, muscle-clenching, tooth-clicking, rhythm-aping fun. A sunny brass section seals the deal, aking the affair a whole lot more majestic and sonorous than with the standalone plinks of strings and the like. Really, really nice song.

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