“The whole shape and structure of the record is very much in debt to Low,” says Willgoose. This brought closer several inescapable musical touchstones: Depeche Mode’s classic eighties triumvirate, U2’s Achtung Baby and, crucially, Bowie’s “Heroes” and Low. He wrote and recorded in Kreuzberg’s famous Hansa Tonstudio recording complex. It’s what I was trying to do in the wider sense, I suppose – to capture those tiny little pulses you pick up while walking through a city.” “You can hear a few of these little frequency buzzes, clicks and impulses in Im Licht (a song inspired in part by pioneering lightbulb manufacturers AEG and Siemens). “I walked up and down recording electrical currents and interference,” he laughs. Combining sound archaeology and the flâneuring of the psychogeographer, one street-level pursuit of the city’s energy involved Willgoose walking the Leipzigerstrasse, site of the city’s first electric streetlight, using a wide-band electromagnetic receiver from Moscow’s Soma Laboratories. Willgoose moved to Berlin from April 2019 to January 2020. I sent it to the rest of the band, and said, I know it’s going to change, but we’ll see how the city itself colours that.” said “I started to get a feeling for where the title of Bright Magic wanted to take me, towards ideas of illumination and inspiration, electricity and flashes of light and colour and sound (all the tracks would eventually be colour coded). Resolving to integrate these long- gone fragments with new manipulated sound sources, he set about making his own Wochenende, a narrative drama for the ears which decodes and realises the dreams of Berlin he’d constructed in his mind. Created in 1928, the piece collaged speech, field recordings and music into a sonic evocation of the city. A Eureka moment of sorts came in November 2018 when Willgoose heard Walter Ruttmann’s radical Berlin tape-artwork Wochenende (or Weekend), which is sampled on three of Bright Magic’s tracks. It differs from their previous albums in other ways: less linear and narrative, instead it’s an impressionistic portrait of a city from the ground up. Though PSB’s use of electronics and surging guitar rock remain familiar, Bright Magic uses samples, and the English language, sparingly. It’s become an album about moving to Berlin to write an album about people who move to Berlin to write an album…” I knew the album was going to be about the city, and its history and myths, and I was going to move there. “In my head, it was whirring and pulsing away for a long time, even before Every Valley - this fascinating, contrary, seductive place. “Doing this felt inevitable, somehow,” muses J. Moving to Berlin was an inspiration energised by reading Rory MacLean’s Berlin: Imagine a City. Pointedly topical in its analyses, it reached number four on the UK charts.
In 2017, joined by voices including Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield, Every Valley was a moving exploration of community and memory via the rise and fall of the British coal industry. Two years later, The Race For Space used similar methods to laud the superpowers’ rivalry and heroism in orbit and on the Moon. 2013’s debut album Inform - Educate - Entertain used archival samples from the British Film Institute as audio-portals to the Battle Of Britain, the summit of Everest and beyond. Public Service Broadcasting have been “teaching the lessons of the past through the music of the future” for more than a decade now.
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