Spooky Affair: Haunted House Party

Glasgow's prestigious School of Art has quite rightly earned a reputation as a hot bed for up and coming musical talents, with many of the cities biggest exports coming through its doors as students. The down side to this is that Art-School now seems to have been further solidified, in local terms at least, as a lazy journalism short hand and label with no specific meaning about the music it's applied to. As Haunted House Party's members Tom and Steev are both graduates of the School of Art, they will undoubtedly have to wear this label and all its baggage purely on the basis of their education rather than any assessment of their music. But in judging them on their output rather than their CV, it's quickly apparent why they fall outside of these preconceived, shallow, but disarmingly ambiguous notions of classification. It's a 4/4 dance affair, making "non-threatening, non-serious, good time mild euphoria." Hardly the stereotype Art School band, but hardly your average dance band either.

Coming across as a lo-fi 80s synth party band, Haunted House Party's sound doesn't owe much to the modern production techniques of their contemporaries. Their charm comes from the fact that through their self-conscious, but unlaboured bare bones production, they achieve a sound that is at once both modern and dated. Playing from their equipment live and shunning any notion of pre-planned sequences beyond basic song patterns not only allows for adapting each of their performances to their audiences reactions, but also introduces an organic element to synthetic instrumentation. "It means there's space for us improvising also which is always good fun. I love hearing music with mistakes in it. It's fucking human nature to mess up every so often. The wrong note can often be a beautiful thing in a man's life," say Tom and Steev.

"I cant really highlight enough the fact that this is just something fun that we enjoy doing and not really something we are taking all that seriously, although don't get me wrong, we love doing it and we care about what we do, but it's not going to kill us if someone thinks it's too cheesy or thinks our drum sounds are rubbish."

With an approach that's commendably candid in its intention to have fun and make fun dance music, and their lack of pretensions in doing it, Haunted House Party cater directly to the masses of revellers. In freely admitting that their music doesn't really mean anything, and isn't particularly intelligent, they actually adopt a grassroots approach to what's important about dance music; they value the immediacy of the live experience and dancing for the sake of it: "There's no fancy effects going on or vocal stabs and maybe that honesty appeals to people. I like the idea that it's just two people with synths in front of them making noises happen that people can enjoy guilt-free. It is a beautiful moment in a man's life when simply turning a dial up over a period of say, a minute, can have other men jumping in the air and have young ladies dampening their pants in anticipation. I like to think this is what happens anyway. Definitely a big aspect is anticipation and climax. If you could prolong that feeling and bottle it you could sell it as a very nice drug."

Sample for yourself. Their first 12" is due for release on Whiteheat Records later this year and their admittedly sporadic touring schedule will see them play Glasgow and Edinburgh within the next month.