In the unlikely event that anyone has been following the semi-regular posting of downloads of the stuff I recorded as Do Easy, you might also note how I've been posting this stuff more or less in the order of release; so with the most recent cassette having been The Fourteenth Metal Tape, that brings us to Five Track Compact Cassette and Exquisite Torment, both from 1984, and both being C15 cassette singles (for the sake of argument) sold for fifty pence in an effort to reach a moderately wider audience, or just an audience.
Five Track Compact Cassette comprised new improved versions of earlier songs - Actors, I and the Village, Song, Image Control and Second Brain Product - and I put a bit of effort into getting them sounding as good as I could, having begun to grow tired of tracks which sounded shite next morning once the excitement had worn off. I'm not saying this was classic material, but it was okay compared to some of the rubbish I'd produced, and I know a couple of people who still seem to view Five Track Compact Cassette with something resembling affection. It might have been my best seller too, fifty or sixty copies or something like that.
Exquisite Torment was recorded a couple of months later, just the two tracks this time - Knife in My Side and The Ecstacy of Spite - and you can tell I was starting to go a bit mad. I was due to be turfed out of my home seeing as my parents were split and I was going away to college, I was suffering from severe testosterone poisoning, and I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be Marc Almond or William Bennett. Also, I'd just read a load of stuff about use of subliminals, so I tried them out on these tracks in an effort to persuade a naked lady to have sexual intercourse with me, and it fucking worked too. Get in there.
Anyway, with these being just C15s, and seeing as how I want to finish posting all this crap before I die of old age, it seemed a better idea to just offer Purifier, which is the name I later gave to the three tapes on which I had kept all the master recordings for the cassette singles and all the tracks I'd started churning out for inclusion on other people's compilation cassettes; and particularly as this three-hours worth of material neatly bridges the gap between The Fourteenth Metal Tape and The Thirty-Fifth Release, which is the next full-length Do Easy tape in sequence - except for the fucking awful Damned cover version which was tossed off in 1986 for the sake of filling up side six.
Okay, so here we have the two cassette singles, plus tracks which appeared on compilations such as Another Lost Cause (Refill Tapes), Political Piggies (Anal Probe) plus I think at least one other cassette by the Grey Wolves lads, and Inhibitor and Kill Technology which Larry Peterson of Cause For Concern asked for but never used - I have the tapes, but not here with me in Texas, so I can't really check what was what at the moment and it was a long time ago. Also, having embarked on a career in the yartz in September 1983 - or at least signed up for an art foundation course - I'd started making vaguely industrial videos in an effort to be more like Cabaret Voltaire, yielding soundtrack material which didn't really fit in anywhere else, so that's included here too. If anyone really needs to know what the videos looked like, there are some screen shots here. I watched a VHS copy of all my video work back in 2011, then wrote this obituary, and decided it really wasn't worth the effort having them converted to something I could upload to YouTube, seeing as how they're mostly shit.
I had a vague intention of releasing this as a three tape set but just never got around to it. There are a couple of stinkers for sure, but mostly it seems generally listenable, at least by my standards. The lyrics are often hilariously earnest and at least one track sounds like The Heat is On by Glenn Frey (mortifying seeing as I was actually trying to sound like Alternative TV), but fuck it, I expect you've downloaded much worse.
Synthnerds - the analogue synth you can hear on some of these tracks - All My Friends, The Ecstacy of Spite etc. - was a homemade job built from the pages of Practical Electronics (or one of those mags) by my friend Justin's dad, and which I purchased for thirty quid. It had two oscillators and was great while it worked, but just sort of conked out before I was really able to discover what all the knobs were for, Captain Peacock.
Five Track Compact Cassette comprised new improved versions of earlier songs - Actors, I and the Village, Song, Image Control and Second Brain Product - and I put a bit of effort into getting them sounding as good as I could, having begun to grow tired of tracks which sounded shite next morning once the excitement had worn off. I'm not saying this was classic material, but it was okay compared to some of the rubbish I'd produced, and I know a couple of people who still seem to view Five Track Compact Cassette with something resembling affection. It might have been my best seller too, fifty or sixty copies or something like that.
Exquisite Torment was recorded a couple of months later, just the two tracks this time - Knife in My Side and The Ecstacy of Spite - and you can tell I was starting to go a bit mad. I was due to be turfed out of my home seeing as my parents were split and I was going away to college, I was suffering from severe testosterone poisoning, and I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be Marc Almond or William Bennett. Also, I'd just read a load of stuff about use of subliminals, so I tried them out on these tracks in an effort to persuade a naked lady to have sexual intercourse with me, and it fucking worked too. Get in there.
Anyway, with these being just C15s, and seeing as how I want to finish posting all this crap before I die of old age, it seemed a better idea to just offer Purifier, which is the name I later gave to the three tapes on which I had kept all the master recordings for the cassette singles and all the tracks I'd started churning out for inclusion on other people's compilation cassettes; and particularly as this three-hours worth of material neatly bridges the gap between The Fourteenth Metal Tape and The Thirty-Fifth Release, which is the next full-length Do Easy tape in sequence - except for the fucking awful Damned cover version which was tossed off in 1986 for the sake of filling up side six.
Okay, so here we have the two cassette singles, plus tracks which appeared on compilations such as Another Lost Cause (Refill Tapes), Political Piggies (Anal Probe) plus I think at least one other cassette by the Grey Wolves lads, and Inhibitor and Kill Technology which Larry Peterson of Cause For Concern asked for but never used - I have the tapes, but not here with me in Texas, so I can't really check what was what at the moment and it was a long time ago. Also, having embarked on a career in the yartz in September 1983 - or at least signed up for an art foundation course - I'd started making vaguely industrial videos in an effort to be more like Cabaret Voltaire, yielding soundtrack material which didn't really fit in anywhere else, so that's included here too. If anyone really needs to know what the videos looked like, there are some screen shots here. I watched a VHS copy of all my video work back in 2011, then wrote this obituary, and decided it really wasn't worth the effort having them converted to something I could upload to YouTube, seeing as how they're mostly shit.
I had a vague intention of releasing this as a three tape set but just never got around to it. There are a couple of stinkers for sure, but mostly it seems generally listenable, at least by my standards. The lyrics are often hilariously earnest and at least one track sounds like The Heat is On by Glenn Frey (mortifying seeing as I was actually trying to sound like Alternative TV), but fuck it, I expect you've downloaded much worse.
Synthnerds - the analogue synth you can hear on some of these tracks - All My Friends, The Ecstacy of Spite etc. - was a homemade job built from the pages of Practical Electronics (or one of those mags) by my friend Justin's dad, and which I purchased for thirty quid. It had two oscillators and was great while it worked, but just sort of conked out before I was really able to discover what all the knobs were for, Captain Peacock.
Tracks:
1 - Inhibitor
2 - Kill Technology
3 - My Remaining Eye
4 - British Movement I
5 - Let Down
6 - British Movement II
7 - Improvisation
8 - Documentary
9 - Distortion (film soundtrack)
10 - Nuove Tendenze
11 - Vicar Vicar Straight into the Public Lavatory
12 - All My Friends
13 - Waterside at 12
...and the second one here.
14 - Inspecting the Experimental Grain Fields at Ostia Near Rome
15 - The Discipline
16 - Kick the Dwarf
17 - Actors
18 - I and the Village
19 - Image Control
20 - Song
21 - Second Brain Product
22 - The Silence Deepened (video soundtrack)
23 - The Fart
24 - Domestic Control Section (installation soundtrack)
25 - Portrait of a Minority (installation soundtrack)
26 - Intolerance (video soundtrack)
27 - The Voice of Reason
28 - Winter Again
29 - Thee 23rd Message to thee Temple
...and the third volume here.
30 - Knife in My Side
31 - The Ecstacy of Spite
32 - Our Tune
33 - Nobody Can Describe How We Truly Feel
34 - Republic of Saló
35 - In the Moral Hit Parade
36 - Pair of Trousers
37 - Mussolini & a Plate of Gruts
38 - Over the Bay of Naples
39 - Lie Through My Teeth
40 - Don't Cry Wolf
Return to Index
I have & enjoy FTCC. Sure I'll enjoy all this as well. Ta!
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