Friday 16 September 2016

Soul Providers - Calli Yei (1998) C90


I'm not sure there's much I can say about this third Soul Providers tape which hasn't already been said either here or here. Ed, Steve and myself recorded this whole thing live onto tape in my front room on the last day of October, 1998 - which I suppose would have been Halloween. I suppose we should have made something of that, but never mind. Aside from a couple of minutes of me testing the levels right at the beginning, this pretty much works as a single track, and can hopefully be listened to as such. Anyone who has been listening to these things as I post them might also note that this one sounds more expensive than previous efforts. Either I had just borrowed some new fancy effects box and was shoving everything through that, or maybe we were just getting better at it, whatever it was.

Trainspotters might like to note use of a certain drum pattern at one point, a drum pattern which older boys and girls will possibly remember from either Third Door from the Left's Under Attack or even Cabaret Voltaire's Nag Nag Nag. The (admittedly not very interesting) story behind this is that back in the mists of time I asked Kevin Thorne of Third Door from the Left whether he had bought Cabaret Voltaire's old drum machine or something, but it turned out that Stephen Mallinder had done him a cassette of rhythms for his general use, and so Kevin very kindly ran me off a copy. So there you go.

For what it may be worth, the name Shoulder Lion - which I enjoyed for its Dadaist potential - came from an amusingly (to me) poor translation of Acolmiztli, the name or possibly title of a Prehispanic ruler of the Mexican city of Texcoco which appeared in some library book or other. A more accurate translation might be Lion of the Acolhua People, except miztli means feline rather than any specific type of feline, and the name of the Acolhua - one of those cultural groups who have since been erroneously identified as Aztecs - includes a term referring to a shoulder, or which can be taken to stand for the same, but otherwise doesn't directly translate without an essay's worth of explanations.




Tracks:
1 - Set Up
2 - Shoulder Lion part one
3 - Shoulder Lion part two


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