Spell Blanket (Collected Demos 2006-​2009)

Thirteen years after Trish Keenan's death, a collection of her demos, home recordings, and voice notes offers an intimate and at times heartbreaking look at her otherworldly genius.

In 1975, a time-traveling being from a distant but familiar realm left an indelible imprint on Trish Keenan's mind. The titular character from Sky, one of a crop of bizarre British sci-fi shows supposedly made for children in the '60s and '70s, speaks with a cold, eerie affect, his voice warped slightly by tight echo. When exercising his telepathic powers, Sky stares down the barrel of the camera, his eyes and splayed palm imbued with a crude chroma-key glow. James Cargill, who formed Broadcast with Keenan in 1995, spoke of Sky's deep influence on the band during a 2009 interview with XLR8R. He cited the show's cocoon of white noise and paranoid, spectral atmosphere as key building blocks to Broadcast's brand of retro-futurist psychedelia. In promotional photos, Keenan often emulated Sky, bathed in oversaturated colors and stretching her hand toward the viewer. She always seemed extemporal, as though her icy contralto and surrealist lyrics were beamed in from some far corner of time and space. When Keenan died of pneumonia in 2011, it was tragic not only for the sudden loss of a brilliant, exploratory musician, but because a portal to some other dimension had been permanently closed.

- Pitchfork