Start with a group of teenaged friends, a radio show, a record shop, and a shed where they can gather and make a racket. The origin story of Movietone, which is also that of the small but mighty Bristol scene its members and friends created together in the early 1990s, is in one sense an archetypal tale. But the music they made together during their run was theirs alone. Their albums were weather systems, handmade assemblages of creaky folk, jazz-derived rumble, and dream-pop that’d been dried in the sun, wrapped in packages that seemed as if they’d been discovered in a cobwebbed attic.

Kate Wright and Rachel Coe became friends at Cotham Grammar School in their early teens. They were outcasts drawn to art who felt they understood something the straight world didn’t. Naturally, they bonded over Joy Division, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Cure. In an interview with The Wire, Coe described the clique of their youth—which included another friend, Matt Elliott—in familiar terms. “We were sort of insular and had a little laugh at everyone else,” she told writer Joseph Stannard, “We were very judgmental about music and decided somehow that we were gonna make music ourselves.”

In late-’80s Britain, kids searching for meaning in the sub rosa culture of the underground had a few promising starting points. Nationally, you had Melody Maker, NME, Sounds, and the rest of the music press that writer Mark Sinker later characterized as a “hidden landscape once a week.” In his remembrance of the weekly “inkies” of the period, Simon Reynolds described the publications as an “all-enveloping experience that allowed you to escape from your real surroundings, with all their dreary limitations, and achieve vicarious access to the place where all the action was happening and all the ideas were percolating.” In parallel to the treasures found on the newsstands, those with an ear for adventurous sounds tuned in regularly to John Peel’s show on BBC Radio 1. Wright was an avid listener who frequently wrote letters to the host, and she was delighted when he eventually read one of them on the air.

Coe and Wright’s hometown had a longstanding bohemian tradition and strong musical history. To Americans tuned into what was going on in England at the time, it seemed cool and exotic. “Situated in the pastoral region known as the West Country, Bristol is something like an English San Francisco—as multiracial as London but more laid back,” is how Reynolds described it in The New York Times in 1995. He was writing about Portishead, Massive Attack, and Tricky, the trip-hop triumvirate that, for most, defined the city’s place in music in the decade (honorable mention to junglists Roni Size & Reprazent). But there was still room to operate in that world’s shadow, and another network of record-obsessed kids was starting to make their way.

The locus for much of their activity was Revolver, the record shop tucked away on a lane a short walk from Cotham. Wright and her crew were regulars at the store, which specialized in reggae, dub, free jazz, and psychedelia, and Elliott eventually scored a job there. The shop’s owner, Roger Doughty, wasn’t afraid to offer a disparaging comment on a customer’s selections and was all too happy to suggest an alternative. Richard King, a rabid music fan and eventual label owner whose involvement with Movietone we’ll return to shortly, wrote a memoir about his time working at the shop called Original Rockers. For its regular patrons, he wrote, “Revolver ceased to be merely a shop and became the locus of their musical consciousness.” It was the kind of place that “curated and stocked an anti-canon, a permanent selection of records that it considered to be essential purchases.”

Revolver became a hub for several interconnected bands joined by the shared musical consciousness King describes. The bands themselves sometimes lost track of who played with whom and when, but the sprawl of projects allowed for experimentation. Charged by this broadening knowledge and armed with a few cheap instruments, Wright, Coe, and Elliott began bashing around in a small structure in Coe’s backyard. An older friend from school, Matt Jones, had shown Wright a few chords to a Galaxie 500 song she liked, but the main point early on was to make as much noise as possible. Dave Pearce, who worked at Revolver and would soon record with Coe as Flying Saucer Attack, dropped by to play, and tried to steer the group—then called Linda’s Strange Vacation—in the direction of proper songs.

Shortly after, King started a new label called Planet, and put a flier in the shop saying he was looking for bands. The trio, now calling themselves Movietone, submitted a demo tape and two songs wound up on a single in 1994. John Peel put in the rotation, and they recorded a session for his show shortly after. Matt Jones joined the new group on drums—by this point, Wright was playing bass in his band, Crescent, and the two groups overlapped almost completely in terms of memberships—and his brother Sam, on guitar, would follow him. Elliott, meanwhile, left to work on his project, Third Eye Foundation.

Their 1995 self-titled debut was steeped in signifiers of post-punk and shambolic indie, bands like the Pastels or Television Personalities. But Movietone had an especially prominent psychedelic streak and seemed to exist in a more abstract space. Wright often spoke her lyrics, which were surreal and indebted to William Burroughs’ cut-up techniques. “I know you’re here/48—a packet of matches” goes an odd couplet from “Late July,” a stark folk song featuring just her voice and acoustic guitar on which each string pluck is approximately twice as high in the mix as her vocals.

King got a job at Domino and brought Movietone with him, leading to 1997’s less extreme and more refined Day and Night. Gone were the jarring experimental touches, like the thrilling atonal screeches that blasted holes through gentle psychedelic ballads. But the bigger difference was Wright’s songwriting, which was less word-drunk and disarmingly precise.

It took a while to record The Blossom Filled Streets, partly because the members of Movietone were playing and recording with other bands, and partly because everyone in the group had taken day jobs. For a time, Wright and some band members lived in a large, decaying house in Bristol, and they would set up instruments and microphones in hallways or the yard outside to capture sounds while keeping their instruments away from leaky ceilings. More often, they were recording in a proper studio and working out more sophisticated arrangements, many of which involved layering Coe’s clarinet with viola provided by Florence Lovegrove and a kind of homemade cello played by Chris Cole. On certain tracks, their contributions turned Movietone into a jazz-folk chamber group with sharp edges protruding from a thick and wooly covering of drone.

These arrangements thickened songs and made some tracks sound bigger than anything the band had attempted before, yet Wright continued to pare her lyrics to the bone, and skeletal folk was still in the mix. Some songs are personal, directly inspired by the deaths of people close to her. In a 2000 interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, she described the album as “a kind of retrospective on their lives, all the really beautiful things,” but her language is allusive, speaking more to the subconscious and exploring the nature of memory. Sensations and fragments of thought flitter away in one song and then return, as if by concentrating hard on cycles of repetition she’ll prevent life from spinning away.

The wondrous opener “Hydra,” perhaps named for the Greek island where Leonard Cohen lived in the 1960s, begins with a seesaw drone from a viola and clarinet that braid around each other. Matt Jones’ drumming is loose and wild, heavy on cymbal splash and rimshots, and bits of screeching feedback in the distance sound like sea birds. Against this backdrop, Wright’s lyrics are stark and clear, each word a picture and the verses a slideshow. She’s so fond of certain settings and descriptions, they will reappear over and over on the record, each time with a slightly different tint. There are colors—blue, green, grey—and she introduces birds, fish, the elements. As with most of the album, the action on “Hydra” unfolds where the sea meets the shore, the liminal space between one form of life and the next.

“The sky is 10,000k today” is the first line, sketching out the vastness of the setting where this record will unfold, and she follows “High on the beach/There’s 1950s chairs/Weathered by the salt in the air” shortly after. It’s the language of noticing, of taking in what’s in front of you and translating it to sound with a plainness that becomes poetic. When the band takes flight after Wright finishes a verse, and Coe’s clarinet shifts from velvety held tones to atonal shrieks, Movietone’s love of improvisation finds its most ecstatic expression. Though these are musicians from a world away and—let’s be very clear—of an entirely different caliber, “Hydra,” not unlike parts of Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, evokes the yearning of spiritual jazz, the joyous head-down charge of the John Coltrane Quartet with Eric Dolphy.

Several songs on The Blossom Filled Streets seem to exist in disconnected pairs, with a later track on the album serving as a fractured mirror image of its twin. “1930s Beach House,” based on a vivid scene from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, seems like a reflection of the opener. Wright had the band read the passage in question to absorb its nocturnal mystery, and the song unfolds slowly and patiently, with a ghostly slide guitar and a repeating drum roll that suggests the anxiety of a tire with a nail in it steadily deflating as you wind along a narrow road. The music clatters and hums, growing and then falling in intensity, as Wright sings of a couple driving along the coast under a moon, soon to be married but with trouble lurking ahead.

The second and fifth tracks form another pair that seem to touch on Wright’s loss. “Star Ruby,” accompanied by acoustic guitar and piano, recalls the quiet, folkier tracks found on Day and Night, and its lyric has the air of a requiem: “Sleep well/Now is the time for the new flowers/It’s time for the cherry blossoms to come.” The title track picks up the floral imagery and meditates on the idea that, while the words of a friend may disappear, the images remain. It starts with piano, brushed drums, buzzes, and chimes that serve as a kind of prelude, and then falls into a circular melody that Wright sings with the simple beauty of a child who has discovered a soothing tune to hum in a time of trouble.

The three instrumental tracks all sound as if they might have been cut in that old house. They’re filled with creaks and hisses and the resonance of wood, and their titles advance a few of the record’s themes. “Year Ending” has a prominent Fender Rhodes and a whistle that might be electronics or might be bird song. “Seagulls/Bass” is just like it says on the tin, with avian field recordings and low-end hum and a bit of clarinet and plucked cello folded in the mix. And on “In a Marine Light,” Coe transforms the sound of her clarinet, turning it away from its symphonic roots into something pastoral, where the plant matter used for the instrument’s reed devolves into the piercing buzz of the swamp. These tracks are mostly unmetered and free, lending a sense of ramshackle found-object improv.

The final diptych of connected songs comprises the sixth, “Porthcurno,” and the ninth and last, “Night in These Rooms.” In each, death now seems longer ago, and now Wright seems like she’s thinking about the future and the nature of mortality. The idea, it seems, is to slow down time, reduce the half-life of decay while simultaneously reveling in the beauty of transformation. “Let’s just breathe and see for a while,” Wright sings on the former track over piano and bass, and it’s such a fantastic line, the confidence of it, knowing we’ll recognize quiet blankness as a momentary state of bliss. The closing track is jazzier and folkier, with Coe’s clarinet taking on a new warmth. Wright can still hear the waves crashing outside, grief is still a weight pressing down, but the tune is sad and pretty, but the tune is sad and pretty, and she seems to have found some peace and acceptance: “Tonight I’ll let the ocean in/And these dark corners, I’ll just let them be.”

The Blossom Filled Streets entered the world in the summer of 2000, and Domino gave Movietone a small push, securing more press and even a brief tour of America. Notices were good, with many writers noting the group’s unusual mix of genres. In The Wire, the outlet that always championed the band, David Kennan hailed the record’s rare beauty and connected it to eccentric English artists like Robert Wyatt, Syd Barrett, and David Tibet. Others were less kind. The NME described the Movietone’s aesthetic as “Maybe there’s an old jazz record playing in the house across the bay, or a broken guitar feeding back almost out of earshot. It’s hard to tell.” But Wright found the description amusing and even inspiring—the band’s excellent final LP, 2003’s The Sand and Stars, was partly recorded on a beach in tribute.

After that, life intervened. Coe started a family, Matt and Sam Jones continued with Crescent. Wright has been working on an archival book and slowly recording songs for a new project called 1000 Dawns, which features members of her former band. But Movietone remains in the air, an overlooked band ripe for rediscovery. “One of the great unknown English groups, who were so obscure compared to what they should be,” said Stephen McRobbie in a Quietus Baker’s Dozen. “Perfect music,” said Carla dal Forno about The Blossom Filled Streets in another.

One of the beautiful things about Movietone is that they’re almost always written about as a spoke in their local scene’s wheel. The connections between the groups, offer a welcome vision of community in action. People discuss the Bristol post-rock scene as a whole because no one band eclipsed the others. They were all “small,” strictly speaking, and they all mattered. The crew that came together in a record shop turned their dreams into something real.

I knew none of this history when, by chance, I saw Movietone play in late 2000. I had just moved to Greensboro, N.C., and other than my partner, Julie, I didn’t know a soul. But I was on the path to becoming a regular at Gate City Noise, a record and skate shop on Tate Street next to the university. I’d pop in after writing at a nearby coffee shop, check out the new arrivals, and talk music with Andrew, the owner. One night I walked in and Movietone had just started playing. I’d lucked into an in-store performance, and I was immediately transfixed. This was strange and thrilling music—it was loud, I can still hear Coe’s clarinet snaking between the rafters—and I could sense that I was among my people.