Trish Keenan and James Cargill are Birmingham natives who did something, on the surface of it, that isn’t all that remarkable: mined the Sixties for inspiration. In a radio interview, Keenan told an American radio DJ that she thought Broadcast was “traditional, compared to most experimental music.” We lost her suddenly in 2011 to pneumonia, but she leaves behind a remarkable catalog that is anything but traditional. She and Cargill brought up their influences before anybody else could guess at them: The United States of America (a psychedelic one-off album that seemed perfect to them, and us), Czech experimental film, witches, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and psychedelia in the broadest sense. The Noise Made By People is a bit like Dusty Springfield singing over industrial shorts from the Fifties. Sort of? If Boards of Canada made nostalgia an animate force with their machines, Broadcast did it with the voice and instruments. But one thing about this band is that it rarely sounds like they’re playing anything traditional. Beyond Keenan’s singing and the drums, it’s hard to say what is going on, not because it’s so odd but because it all sounds like nature documentaries or French movies. Keenan sang at a completely even level, determined to prevent emotion from wobbling her boat. When she sings “come on, let’s go,” in the best known song here, there’s no pain and no hurry. It’s just time to go. Joe Meek producing someone reading Auden, slowly? Maybe it was that. Or try another song, “Until Then,” where Keenan is the only identifiable source, aside from an electric bass. The rest could be strings or string samples or electric bouzoukis or clavinets or walkie talkies. The sparkly toys of mid-century modernization slowly melting through a table made of ice as a long, slow theater piece plays out of a cassette machine sealed into the wall.

Indie psychedelia at the end of the ’90s typically meant fealty to acid rock and its sprawling, squalling guitars, but one group from Black Sabbath’s Birmingham produced their own oblique angle. Broadcast were musically indebted to a more evocatively strange yet wonderfully melodic electronic vein of ’60s space-age pop-art psych. Their full-length debut imagines limitless tomorrows from yesterday’s curiosities, pierced with the unforgettable voice of Trish Keenan, her cool facade concealing a compelling sense of resilient wonder.