Showing posts with label Anthropod Lithontriptic Band. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anthropod Lithontriptic Band. Show all posts

Friday, 26 May 2017

Trilogy - Tapestry (1984) C60


The first full length cassette released on my Do Easy label by someone other than myself was Hopscotch by Opera for Industry (February 1984 I think), and the second - about four months later - was Tapestry by the Complete Trilogy. The Complete Trilogy, whom I seem to recall having been named after some book I'd never heard of, was the work of one Thomas Docherty, whom I suspect got fairly tired of having to explain that no, he wasn't the former manager of Manchester United. He wrote following Larry Peterson having given me the big up in Scum #6 fanzine. He had pretty much the same limited set up as myself, with everything being recorded onto a home stereo, but he seemed to achieve quite a lot with very little, as can be heard on Tapestry - from which I nicked his technique of playing several copies of the same recording out of sync so as to create a sort of budget echo effect. Anyway, I liked the tape so I released it, once I was certain TD - as he signed his letters - understood that I probably wasn't going to make him famous.

The tape sold quite well by my standards, more than thirty, probably not in excess of fifty copies from what I can recall. A couple of the tracks appeared on Black Dwarf's Ars Magna et Ultima compilation, so maybe that was something to do with it. Actually, I seem to recall TD being quite good friends with Tim Gane and the possibility of a Trilogy / Unkommuniti split album was discussed at one point.


Due to his parents' trade, TD lived on a building site in Hatfield and had one of the most amusingly industrial addresses ever, and myself and my friend Grez drove down there to meet him during the summer of 1984. We all bonded instantly over our shared obsession with Laurel & Hardy and TD played us a new track he'd recorded called Words Cannot Describe, elements of which apparently derived from recordings made inside some giant metal pipeline he'd found. To this day Words Cannot Describe remains, at least for me, one of the scariest pieces of mutter mumble industrial music I've heard outside of Heathen Earth or Psykho Genetika - turn off the lights, wack up the volume, and maybe you'll see what I mean.

A few months later, TD decided to shorten the name to Trilogy and revise the tape, replacing Metallic Grey with Words Cannot Describe. Personally I wasn't too sure about this, believing that music albums should be left as products of their time, but I did it anyway. Words Cannot Describe is probably the better track, although oddly I find that Metallic Grey - despite the obvious Throbbing Gristle influence - seems to foreshadow the twisted cabaret sound of TD's later material recorded as Frenzied Encounters. Anyway, I've digitised both versions of the tape, so once you've downloaded I suppose you could shuffle either track six or seven to see which version of the album you prefer; or just keep them both because they seem to work together just fine, I'd say. I should probably point out that the recording volume on the original tape varies wildly, presumably so as to give greater dramatic impact to the really noisy stuff such as Our Patience Will End. I've done what I can, but you may want to fiddle with the volume a bit, and you'll definitely need to wack Words Cannot Describe right up for full impact.

TD is still in existence today and can be found here on YouTube, along with some of the stuff he's worked on over the years since Tapestry.


Tracks:
1 - Tropical
2 - Non-Malignant Breakthrough
3 - Our Patience Will End
4 - Clean Recording
5 - The Dark Night
6 - Metallic Grey
7 - Words Cannot Describe
8 - Tapestry
9 - Orchestral


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Monday, 25 July 2016

F*** F****** - Enjoy! (1991) C60


So as to save time, please refer to the entry for 1988's Stupid C15 for all the relevant explanations, excuses, apologies, and secret origin - although don't bother downloading it (assuming you haven't already done so) as the whole thing turns up as the first six tracks on the album, and as I noticed whilst digitising the thing, these versions are of marginally better quality for some reason.

Excepting the stuff from Stupid, some of this was recorded on a four-track portastudio albeit still with the same basically careless approach as the earlier stuff. Some of these are almost okay, for what they are, although I must admit there are a few I remembered as being better, but never mind.

By 1990 I was living in Lewisham and had a job with Royal Mail. I was also still reading a lot of comic books, which is reflected in this material. Terminator, for example, is directly inspired by a specific Skip Williamson strip from the old undergrounds, and the influences of Crumb, Bill Griffith, Drew Friedman and others will probably be obvious to anyone who knows their work. IQ3 is a cover of an Anthropod Lithontriptic Band song, Anthropod Lithontriptic Band being Graham from the Pre-War Busconductors; and The Arthur Young Workbench is an old Sexton Ming number. Mrs. Sullivan expresses my frustration with a Mrs. Sullivan to whom I delivered mail in my job as a postman, and who was a whining old battle axe. This being over twenty-five years ago, I guess she's dead now, so it looks like I had the last laugh after all.

The cover image was from a birthday card my grandmother sent me that very same year, even though I was in the second half of my twenties, and the title Enjoy! comes from a game played by Carl Glover and myself one afternoon, each drawing imaginary album covers for popular artists of the time in an effort to shock the other into either hysterics or stunned silence. Carl won the game by proposing a new Kylie Minogue collection entitled Enjoy!, the cover of which would be a close up of a ringpiece. You probably had to be there. The title and general spirit of Bad Time Blues also came from the same game.



Tracks:
1 - I Don't Wanna Have to Hurt You, Baby
2 - Beat You Up
3 - Stupid
4 - Terminator
5 - Rockin' Amoeba
6 - Violence
7 - You Won't Like It
8 - We Watch Our Favourite Shows
9 - Neck Tie Party
10 - Stupid (live)
11 - Bad Grades
12 - Badder Than All the Rest
13 - IQ3
14 - Shoot Thy Neighbour
15 - Transylvania
16 - Comic Books
17 - Bust Your Ass
18 - In the Summertime
19 - Beer Drinking Competition
20 - Mrs. Sullivan
21 - Bad Time Blues
22 - Disco Stomp
23 - I, Robot
24 - The Arthur Young Workbench
25 - Too Much Fun

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