Surprise! 🎃 This special track is a Halloween gift to our fans... from our fan!

Halloween has never been a traditional celebration in our country. We have our restrained All Saints Eve or rather, All Souls' Day, but in recent decades since the Velvet Revolution we've adopted the carving pumpkins part of Halloween here. Plus, every year (until this strange one) we have had entertainingly scary Halloween parades for kids (which my kids love so fingers crossed for 2021).

The macabre, spooky, creepy fun and trick-or-treating has never made it here, though, so we've had to devour it in foreign movies and tv series, particularly American ones. My fav episodes of Modern Family, for instance, have been the Halloween ones, in which Claire Dunphy enjoys embracing this kind of fun so much (much more than her husband Phil, to the audience's amusement).

However, we should embrace Halloween in its entirety here in Czechia, because its origins date back to Samhain, the ancient Celtic festival during which people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. In the area where my grandparents were born, the village where I had played in a church for so many years (mentioned in the liner notes to the albums Untuned Piano Day and, especially, Lofi Ambient Xmas), the place we go for the weekends and close to which we moved to from the city almost a decade ago, there had been a Celtic burial site excavated. Hence I zestfully consider our family of Celtic origin.

So when RC++H sent me his Halloween track for our consideration, I was delighted. Partly because of what has been said above but also because RC++H is the moniker of one of our great fans Richard Carlton Hart. And when I write "our" it doesn't mean just for the Binaural Space label – Carlton has been well known among my favourite musicians and labels on twitter, too, frequently tweeting about music and sharing his musical discoveries.

I am delighted and honoured we can welcome RC++H among our little group of fine musicians with his wonderfully spooky track, a Halloween gift to our fans. In the artist's own words: "It's about sharing something with the world and the community of individuals which I've come do admire from afar via bandcamp and twitter. It's very exciting that after all this time I'm finally getting the content made that I've only ever dreamed of actually making." And because Carlton was born only a week after Halloween, his gift to us, music aficionados, is also a "cosmic gift" to his own Birthday.

But enough said – enjoy RC++H‘s marvelously spooky halloween track called Bloated & Festering and have a wonderful Halloween tomorrow!

Binaural Space, October 30, 2020