Family of Noise - Rough Versions (1996) C60

Bit of a dud this week, I'm afraid, but no-one's forcing you to listen to this shit and maybe it will sound as amazing to you in 2019 as it apparently did to me in 1996.

Yes, 1996: I'd just left Academy 23 (or possibly UNIT - can't remember what we were called at the time) because learning all those progressive rock symphonies was beginning to feel a bit too much like homework and I was getting tired of playing other people's songs, not least because I thought mine were better. I was going through a bit of a pre-mid-life crisis crisis and trying to reinvent myself as something less ridiculous, and thusly decided there was no good reason why cunts shouldn't be learning to play my fucking songs for a change. The clock was ticking, so I placed an advert in Melody Maker calling out for musicians with the intention of Family of Noise becoming something which played gigs and got paid. I got a few replies, more than I expected, and made up a demo tape to send out to the authors of those responses which hadn't obviously been prank calls. I was going to reinvent myself as some sort of hybrid of Courtney Love and Marc Almond and these were to be the songs you will be playing, I told my potential minions, should you be good enough to join my amazing band.

The first guy was an Elton John style keyboardist and an American then living next door to Emma Thompson. He said my tape reminded him of Fad Gadget, which seemed fair enough, and he was probably the gayest man I've ever met. He was also massively talented and way out of my league, so I suspect had replied more for the sake of making friends with other weirdos in a foreign country.

The second guy was about fifteen and lived in Chatham with an older, seemingly long-suffering girlfriend. He raved about Hummingbird and then strummed and sang one of his own songs, proposing we might add it to the set. It was called Morphine and suggested not so much that he'd had experience of the drug, but that he listened to a lot of Nirvana records. I reversed from the flat giving a series of positive McCartney-esque thumbs aloft signals, got back to London, then phoned the poor cunt and told him I'd changed my mind.

Finally I met Gareth who, so it turned out, lived around the corner from me. He was already in a band, specifically a popular Queen covers band as their John Deacon, and I don't think he'd been particularly impressed by my tape, but something I'd said had apparently given me away as a fellow Doctor Who fan (this was before it came back to the screen and was shit in 2005), so he got in touch mainly out of curiosity, and we never formed a band but have been pals ever since.

The universe was trying to tell me something, and that was to not bother forming a band. With hindsight I realise that the universe was probably right. While these tracks aren't entirely without their qualities, I couldn't really sing and the lyrics of which I was once so proud are unfortunately spattered with all sorts of faintly ludicrous references intended to make it sound a bit edgy and dangerous, which it actually wasn't.

The first four were from New Golden Age; I don't think My Remaining Eye ever appeared on anything; Hummingbird and The Girl Who Has Everything were eventually recycled as War Drum tracks; New Breed became UNIT's This Hour's Mine, which is a bit of a sore point; Cenotaph, my token dalliance with martial industrial bollocks, turned up on some UNIT tape I haven't got around to digitising (and probably won't bother); and Shit Factory (which was massively influenced by Third Door from the Left and was recorded in Lewisham with the involvement of the late Andrew Cox of Pump and MFH) ended up on War Drum's Year One tape which I haven't bothered digitising as most of the tracks were from other tapes. Also, the original master is a C54 which truncated the end of Shit Factory. As this tape is a compilation, and not so much a straight digitisation as a reconstruction from the original source tapes, there didn't seem to be much point in truncating the last track for the sake of authenticity, so it's the full version.

Download these ten ill-advised tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Song of the Snake
2 - New Face in SE13
3 - New Golden Age
4 - Tin Men
5 - My Remaining Eye
6 - Hummingbird [inst. version]
7 - New Breed
8 - The Girl Who Has Everything
9 - Cenotaph
10 - Shit Factory
 
Return to Index

His-Create-He - The Prison (1982) C20

I don't know anything about this lot. Larry Peterson sent me their demo when I was putting the first Do Easy compilation tape together. I really liked The Prison so I included it on the tape, assuming they would eventually get around to replying to my letters, which they didn't. Little did I realise that the track, presumably the same track, had already appeared on a compilation album called Sing As We Go, released the year before. Subsequent research has unearthed the fact of their having turned into something called Bzu-zu and contributed to a record called Pulsebeat, as described by this bloke. The above picture is actually of Bzu-zu taken from Discogs, which is all I could find.

There was originally a photocopied cover to the tape with the band name - which was definitely hyphenated - spelled out in old English script, and The Prison was titled as I've given it here, not as given on Sing As We Go, for what it may be worth; but it's now lost, I'm afraid. What information I managed to save is that the first three tracks were live at the Clarendon, Hammersmith on 8th of November, 1982; and The Prison was recorded at Golddust Studios, Sidcup on the 6th and 10th of November, 1982, and engineered by Mark of some band called Legend...

Fuck me.

Okay. I've just looked up Golddust Studios and it's the place I used to go to get all my War Drum tapes duplicated around the end of the nineties, and I remember the aforementioned Mark fairly well as he was a good laugh and his rates were very reasonable. What a small fucking world it is. Jesus.

Anyway, I need to have a bit of a sit down, so I'll leave you with His-Create-He who failed to set the world on fire but nevertheless managed a decent demo tape, and were patently of the era of Conflict, New Model Army, the Danse Society and the like.

Just this week I was listening to an old Princess Superstar CD when I realised that the music on one track had been done by a bloke to whom I used to deliver mail when I was a postman in SE London - in fact, I used to deliver his mail using the same Royal Mail bike on which I regularly cycled over to Bromley to get my tapes copied by the bloke who produced the track I used on a compilation tape back in the eighties. It's all connected.

What a week it has been.

Download the tape by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - I Would
2 - Demon Dance
3 - Witchfinder General
4 - The Prison (that Jack Built)
 
Return to Index

You Are Hear 21/10/03

http://

This week's free shit will probably be of limited appeal beyond my wife and anyone who was actually on the show, but it's a recording of a radio broadcast: You Are Hear presented by Jim Backhouse and featuring me as a guest, plus a live session by Noxagt, which went out on Resonance 104.4FM back in October 2003. Jim invited me on to play a load of Mexican stuff and then attempt to form sentences giving account of the same, which was more difficult than you might think. So I suppose you could call it a podcast, if you really want, despite the lack of quirky ukulele music.

 

It's here on my blog because I am very, very vain, but also because the music is mostly worth hearing, and Jim put on a good show. This is as much of the show as would fit on a hastily located C90 at the time, so it's not all of it, but it's probably as much as you need (and is in any case as much as I have). I've glued the end of side one to the beginning of side two so as to allow for continuous play as a single track, and I haven't broken up any of what Jim played into individual tracks because that would be fucking stupid.

 

I'd like to think that I'm a bit more able to string a sentence together these days without all the mumbling and gasps of exasperation as I labour to recall even the simplest, most obvious words, but my more recent performance on the Raconteur Roundtable podcast shows that this simply isn't true. Oh well. Hopefully you can get something from this regardless. There were a couple of digital glitches here and there, but I've kept them because I'm lazy and I think they were part of the show, and ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN ON LIVE TELEVISION. That's also me you can hear asking whether everything is okay immediately following Noxagt accidentally eating their own drum kit during broadcast. They were playing in the studio downstairs, requiring that I go down and check that no-one had actually died, which thankfully they hadn't. Crazy times.

 

Featured music comes from Hanatarash, Kovert, Palais Schaumburg, various unidentified Zuni and Tepehuano musicians, Delfino Guevara, Antonio Zepeda, Tribu, Noxagt, Ceramic Hobs, the Noblemen, DJ Tranquilizer, UNIT, War Drum, and one other whose name I can't work out.

Download the show by clicking on this link.

Return to Index

War Drum - Complex Adaptive System (1998) 12"

This would have been a five track 12" EP except I never managed to get the money together to have the thing pressed, and the longer I waited, the more I realised no-one would buy it or even want to distribute it, and eventually I stopped caring. I seem to recall that Mark of Impulse fanzine (and Konstruktivists) ran me off twenty-five CDR copies, but my disillusionment with CDRs had set in by the time they came in the mail and I never did anything with them. It was recorded at JTI Studios in Brixton with Ian McKay engineering - same place as various Alternative TV and Skullflower records, and (as I've only realised just now) Ramleh's fucking fantastic Blowhole album. It would be nice to think some of the magic rubbed off, but it probably didn't. Anyway, I was at JTI recording a load of stuff with UNIT, probably material for the album which never happened and (frankly) would have been about a million times better than the one which did, and I've a feeling there were a couple of days we had booked upon which it turned out that Dave or Pete or someone wasn't going to be able to make it. Andy was going to ask Ian, who ran the place, if he could just have his money back for those days and let someone else make use of the studio, but I said I'd pay for those days and use them to record some of my own stuff. So that's what I did. This was January and February, 1998.

 

As you can probably hear, I was suffering from neofolk poisoning at the time, but never mind. Penitent wasn't really supposed to be on the non-existent 12" EP, but I recorded it seeing as I had some time left after we'd finished the first five. Lonesome Town is a Ricky Nelson cover, for some reason which made sense in 1998, and the other tracks, excepting Shoemaker-Levy 9, Fragment G, are fancier versions of things I'd already recorded on various War Drum tapes, as can be found elsewhere on this blog. Most of this was just me, although Andy Martin sang backing, played drums, and delivered the spoken vocal on Shoemaker. Ed Pinsent, whom you may recall from either Pestrepeller, Mystery Dick, Sound Projector magazine or his Resonance FM show, played guitar on Shoemaker.

I don't know. It all seemed to make sense at the time.

Download these six tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - A Marriage
2 - Toltec Inheritance
3 - Hummingbird
4 - Shoemaker-Levy 9, Fragment G
5 - Lonesome Town
6 - Penitent
 
Return to Index

War Drum - Final Music (2005) C60

This was the last tape I ever recorded, one that I didn't really regard as having been finished up until I digitised the thing this week. I was mixing the tracks down to a C90 as I recorded them, and about ten minutes into side two, the four-track portastudio I had been borrowing from Eddy Walsh finally gave up the ghost and I couldn't seem to find anyone to fix it. Additionally this was around the time I started seeing Marian, and my life turned to a mire of passive-aggressive shite and mumbo-jumbo, so creative endeavours became difficult to sustain for the next couple of years. Anyway, digging this out in 2017, I notice it's actually just under sixty minutes in length and it sort of sounds finished, so let's just say that it is.

 

I had drifted away from War Drum, partially to concentrate on LDB (the works of which I might post here at some point, or I might not) and partially to concentrate on writing. Then in 2005 I got back into it. I'd been to Mexico four or five times by this point, and had taken a minidisc recorder with me on a couple of those occasions so as to record environmental sound. So Final Music features quite a lot of that environmental sound rearranged and ordered back in England with, this time, a much stronger influence of Mexican artists such as Tribu, Antonio Zepeda, and Jorge Reyes. This one is much closer to how I always wanted War Drum to sound, and so seems fitting as the last thing I ever recorded. The themes are, as will probably be obvious, mostly related to pre-Hispanic Mexican culture, and Idols Behind the Altars is sung in Nahuatl; and yes, it's my own composition. Most of it is either self-explanatory, or at least not difficult to investigate if you care that much. I seem to recall recording Lonesome Town again mainly because previous versions I'd done had been a bit crap.

 

Since digitising this one, I haven't had the chance to listen to the files on decent speakers, so I hope the bass has survived the transfer and that my minidisc recordings of tropical rain can be identified as such rather than just as overpowering hiss, but at least on the strength of the tape as it came through my stereo, I've a feeling this might be the best thing I've ever done (which I state in the awareness of much of my stuff having left considerable room for improvement).

Download the tape by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Primavera
2 - Nexpiltlan
3 - Fifth Sun
4 - Blood and Sand
5 - Idols Behind the Altars
6 - Sick Day
7 - Arrival of the Rain Baby
8 - Lonesome Town 

Return to Index

War Drum - My Heart is Broken OST (2001) C60

Here's another one which never came out as an actual tape, or as anything. The full story of the major motion picture that would have been My Heart is Broken has already been told here - starts on paragraph eight if you can't be arsed to read the bits which don't directly relate to south-east London's answer to Orson Welles. I recorded five tracks according to Paul's description of what he was after, and he said they were amazing, then next day he said they weren't amazing and could I make them a bit better? He lacked the vocabulary to describe what he considered would make them better, so I just remixed them and added a theme song. I don't even remember what happened after that, so probably nuffink innit.

 

I recorded this material on a four-track in February, 2001 and I'm still reasonably pleased with it. That said, it's a bit hissy, and for some reason I could never quite get the bass sounding right. It seemed to be in tune and yet somehow felt like it wasn't, but I could never identify the problem. The bass was purchased from Kingsley, star of My Heart is Broken, for thirty quid, so there was probably a reason why he sold it to me so cheap. Otherwise I still say Paul should have been kissing my ass for taking the trouble to record this stuff for a film which existed mostly in his head.

 

Yes, I am indeed a big fan of The Sweeney.

Download the fifteen tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Main Theme I
2 - Waiting I
3 - Losing Your Marbles I
4 - Main Theme II
5 - Acid Car Chase I
6 - Barry Car Chase I
7 - Sad Song (instrumental I)
8 - Sad Song (instrumental II)
9 - Main Theme III
10 - Waiting II
11 - Losing Your Marbles II
12 - Main Theme IV
13 - Acid Car Chase II
14 - Barry Car Chase II
15 - Sad Song

Return to Index

War Drum - La Quinta Trecena (2000) C90

This was the last War Drum tape which got finished and was sold to people. There were a couple of other tapes after this - half a new album plus a film soundtrack - but nothing complete. I think by this point I'd more or less stopped listening to anything which wasn't rap, and it shows - for better or worse. With hindsight my efforts vaguely resembled those of enterprising 1980s rural English schools making a "rap video" to raise funds for their new swimming pool, as seen on local news programmes and usually featuring lines like Mr. Jones is taking class / He shouts, 'Hey Johnson - get off the grass!'. Still, I like to think I got better after this tape (recording as LDB) and fuck it - at least I was trying something rather than just sticking some Gregorian chant through a reverb and naming it after Aleister Crowley's dog.

The preoccupations here were mostly orientated towards the general direction of Nahuatl-speaking Mexico, excepting the occasional nod at Max Ernst, the first Godzilla film, and Psi-Force comic; and First Steps is another Severed Heads cover, obviously. Colhuacan was indeed recycled from the very first Do Easy tape, in the unlikely event of anyone noticing. As for anything else, explaining it would spoil the fun and I can't be arsed, or in some cases can't remember.

It's no Physical Graffiti, but nevertheless I was quite pleased with this one, and I think it still sounds mostly decent.

Download the seventeen tracks, cover and lyric sheet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - At the First Clear Word
2 - Shadow of Love
3 - Last Exit
4 - Staying Alive
5 - Colhuacan
6 - Chalchiuhxochitl
7 - Biding My Time
8 - Pодство
9 - Ryde or Die
10 - Endless Night
11 - Bride of the Ixcuiname
12 - Chicoce Cuauhtli
13 - Tattered Birdman
14 - Oxygen Destroyer
15 - First Steps
16 - Cueva de Villa Luz
17 - Connect Gang

Return to Index

War Drum - Fatu Hiva (2000) C90

Fatu Hiva was the fourth tape I recorded as War Drum, the first I can still listen to without wincing, and possibly the best thing I've ever recorded - which I state as someone who generally regards most of his own back catalogue as disappointing at best. War Drum's mission statement (what I thought I was playing at) can be extrapolated by referring to previous entries, but could probably be summarised as Death In June with Precolombian Mexican lore in preference to the European stuff and associated Nazi tendencies. I was trying to do something folky without necessarily sounding folky - Looking for Aztlán notwithstanding. Most of this stuff makes sense if you'd boned up on Mexican history and Quetzalcoatl as much as I had, so please feel free to visit the anthropology or mythology sections of your local book store in order to learn more. That said, Caught in the Glare was inspired by my having read up on the planet Mercury, and is - I suppose - a sound painting, if you will, of radiation blasting back out into space from the planet's night-side surface as it slowly turns. The track Fatu Hiva was inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's account of his living on a remote island of the same name.

Musical points of potential interest might be the covers of tracks by Severed Heads and Tuxedo Moon, also that Andy Martin of the Apostles, Academy 23, and UNIT plays electric guitar and provides backing vocals on Looking for Aztlán; and The Cage and Night Song were recorded with Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists on vocals when he came to visit one evening. If you want to dig really deep, part of New God was recorded on a digital studio thing owned by James and Jason of Orange Can, who were NME darlings for a couple of months but somehow failed to become the next Stone Roses.

As for the rest, my listening was pretty much exclusively rap, R&B and the like by this point, the influence of which you'll be able to hear in some of these tracks - particularly For Christopher Rios which was my tribute to the recently deceased Big Pun.

So there you go, on the strength of being arguably the least-shit thing I've ever done, please download and enjoy this one. Amazingly it sold about a hundred copies, or at least I had to do a second run of fifty copies at the place I used to use in Bromley, and by the time I got around to packing up all my shit to move to America, they were all gone; so even if I didn't sell every last one, Fatu Hiva was at least much easier to give away for free than all my other stuff.

Download the eighteen tracks, cover and lyric sheet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Caught In The Glare
2 - Chicoce Coatl
3 - Looking for Aztlán
4 - Fatu Hiva
5 - Kingdom Hall
6 - Southern Cross
7 - Maguey Hare
8 - Nation
9 - On Mission
10 - The Cage
11 - Jaguar Sun
12 - Caxtollice Toxcatl
13 - New God
14 - Night Song
15 - Celebración de la Noche Triste
16 - For Christopher Rios
17 - Tepetlaoztoc II
18 - Land Of Thorns

Return to Index

War Drum - War Drum by War Drum (1998) C90

Usual terms and conditions apply as previously stated here, particularly regarding martial shit, the token bit of neofolk karaoke, and Thanksgiving because it's fucking awful and sounds like one of those shitty Ibiza comedown tracks, all hopefully mitigated by potentially bewildering covers of material by Link Wray and All Saints. I was fairly pleased with this one, for the most part. The tracks came out more or less how I hoped, and it was all recorded on a four-track with access to more technology than had been customary for me. So pleased was I that I splashed out on a two-colour cover so as to invoke the national flag of my beloved Mexico. 

By this point I had given up on rock, pop, industrial, and other music made by white people because it had mostly turned to shit. I went through a period of just listening to old classical albums, and by the time it came to this cassette I was getting into rap, garage and R&B, thanks mainly to people at work, and the influence of that stuff can be heard here in places; although Twilight Years owes its existence to my encountering the first seven studio albums by Iron Maiden in a junk shop on Lordship Lane for the same number of quids and all in good nick.

Andy of the Apostles, Academy 23, and UNIT handles the vocals on Flaying of Men, and whilst we're here, America, Awake! was my adaptation and repurposing of Academy 23's Europe, Awake! to hopefully less dubious seeming ends given that the perspective is changed from that of a white European to a Native American. I wasn't a Native American at the time, and I'm still not one now, but my intentions were noble.

Download the twenty-four tracks, cover and lyric sheet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - One Handed Tormentor
2 - Protomammal
3 - Plains Dweller
4 - Crusader
5 - Nanautzin
6 - Twilight Years
7 - Soul Rebel No. 1
8 - Blood Garage
9 - His Day Sign Was Fortified
10 - Take Everything
11 - Rollergirl
12 - Ce Quiahuitl
13 - Sixth Extinction
14 - Scapegoat
15 - Java Sunday
16 - Thanksgiving
17 - Fat Back
18 - My War Drum
19 - Flaying of Men
20 - Remembrance Day
21 - America, Awake!
22 - Love for the World
23 - Yei Mazatl Quecholli
24 - War of Nerves

Return to Index

War Drum - War Drum No. 2 (1998) C90

I've already made most of the apologies, excuses and disclaimers I might make for this cassette here, so read that if you haven't already done so, otherwise this one probably won't make a lot of sense. Here I was beginning to get fairly pissed off with the limitations of my equipment and tracks recorded by bouncing from tape to tape, hence the inclusion of "previously unreleased" (ho ho ho) material recorded a few years earlier as Family of Noise: two ill-advised neofolk covers and Patriotic Hymn, which was named after the painting by Giacomo Balla and shouldn't as such be taken as indication of my ever having been a raving Nazi. I've always found nationalism interesting, particularly in cases (notably that of Mexico) where it has an arguably positive influence, serving to unify an oppressed underclass in conjunction with revolutionary and hopefully socialist ideals; and the sweeping condemnation of nationalism as a principle is often as much about class (or sneering at the thickies) as it is about politics. Anyway, Patriotic Hymn was supposed to be part of some longer pseudo-classical thing which I actually began to compose as music on that special paper with the five lines and staves and shit, but never finished aside from this and Communication which was on the previous tape. As with the more misanthropic themes on this effort, and the martial aesthetic arising from my fixation with an essentially martial culture, I hopefully shouldn't have to explain that such ideas reflect my interests of the time rather than my most cherished personal beliefs.

The rest of it more or less explains itself, I would hope. The tracks from Mitochondrial Eve onwards benefit from Eddy Walsh kindly lending me a ton of equipment, including a lovely four-track portastudio, hence the dramatic improvement in sound quality for the rest of the tape. I feel there's also a dramatic improvement in War Drum as a musical entity which can be heard on this tape as the new age power electronics evolves into a sort of er... ritual ambient R&B, or summink. War Drum No. 2 probably isn't a masterpiece, but fuck it, this one still sounds pretty good to me.

Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists provided the rhythm on Education as War by the way, if that makes it any more likely that you'll listen to the thing.

Download the twenty-two tracks, cover and lyric sheet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Paynal II
2 - Ash Scatterer
3 - Till the Living Flesh is Burned
4 - Blood Against Gold
5 - Patriotic Hymn
6 - Your Time Will Come
7 - Mactlactli Ollin
8 - Toltec Inheritance
9 - Mitochondrial Eve
10 - Bioweapon
11 - A Marriage
12 - Drift Strain
13 - Education as War
14 - La Llora
15 - Hummingbird
16 - Topa Inca
17 - We Will Survive
18 - Overload
19 - Active Force
20 - New Species
21 - Atonement
22 - Longest Day

Return to Index

War Drum - War Drum No. 1 (1997) C90

I wasn't going to bother with this one, but I had a listen and it's not quite so bad as I remember, so what the fuck.

By 1996 I was thoroughly sick of being me and had decided to be someone else for a while. I think I was probably going round the twist somewhat. One element of this awakening - what I have come to view without irony as a Shamanic process, roughly speaking - demanded a whole shitloads of breaks from the past and from previous ways of doing things in so much as this was even practical. I was tired of the sort of material I wrote or drew or painted or recorded and had decided to start again from scratch. Another element of this awakening was a growing obsession with Mexico, specifically late Postclassic central Mexican culture - the people generally but incorrectly remembered as Aztecs. By obsession I'm not referring to just a T-shirt and a couple of library books, but something which pretty much consumed me and changed the course of my existence, and about which you can read more here if you're that interested.

War Drum was a fresh start because I felt like making music once again, and given my interests of the time it came out as something akin to Muslimgauze but with an entirely different focus, which was intentional. One problem I had experienced, and the one which meant I hadn't actually recorded much of my own music for at least a couple of years, was a lack of equipment. Specifically I had a few bits and pieces but nothing on which to record anything, so I just went ahead and shoved everything into a little four channel mixer and recorded it more or less live onto my home stereo, but for occasionally bouncing tracks by plugging a second tape recorder into the mixer. The quality wasn't great, but then I reasoned it would be no worse than any of those Do Easy tapes recorded by more or less the same method; also that I should be able to produce something listenable if I made some effort to work around the limitations of this set-up, and to keep things simple.

The reason I wasn't going to bother is nothing to do with the quality of the music, such as it is, but that War Drum No. 1 dates from a time when I was still dishing out the benefit of the doubt to certain neofolk types, as indicated by two covers of Sol Invictus songs and at least a couple of lyrical flourishes betraying just how entertaining I once found that Boyd Rice album. I've never had any racial agenda - excepting perhaps a touch of Aztec Fundamentalism coming from a philosophical or aesthetic angle more than anything else - and nor anything along Social Darwinist lines; but I was keen on forging something slightly fierce and scary from my interest in both Mesoamerican history and all of the science I was reading at the time - Dawkins and others, hence the somewhat regrettable monologue of Timebomb which, I feel I should stress, condemns a cultural bias towards quantity over quality of life rather than being the Douglas P style horseshit about bad stock to which it bears unfortunate comparison because I wanted to sound like a hardcase. I'd apologise for the Sol Invictus covers but won't because I still like the songs, despite what I have since accepted to be the unpleasant truth of the source; and even if my versions are a bit John Shuttleworth, I still say my voice is superior to that bellowing noise we once heard coming from the blowhole of the original artist.

The rockabilly numbers may seem a bit mystifying in context - I was going for a sort of back to basics vibe, something as far away as possible from the sort of Wire-reading art gallery shite the rest of this music probably resembles. War Drum was supposed to be folk music, or imaginary folk music, or Muslimgauze eating a taco whilst frowning - something along those lines. Most of the references will make more sense if you have some working knowledge of Nahua culture, (and yes, that would be me trying to sing in Nahuatl on Xochitlacuicatl) although it probably isn't essential. Just pretend it's fake Swans without a drum kit or summink.

Anyway, once I had recorded this masterpiece I got fifty copies professionally duplicated on chrome cassettes by a bloke in Bromley and had a cover printed. I sold a few, gave some away, and eventually got rid of them all. This was in aid of an ideal of producing a cassette tape which didn't look like some half-assed piece of shit, and generally speaking I'm still fairly pleased with this one despite its obvious shortcomings. My biggest mistake was, I suppose, releasing a cassette at a point at which people had more or less stopped bothering with the same, having mostly switched to the greatly inferior medium of CDR.

Download the eighteen tracks, cover, and hilarious lyric sheet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Yei Tepeilhuitl
2 - In Xochitl, In Cuicatl
3 - Penitent
4 - Rex Talionis
5 - Burning Water
6 - I Can't Believe in Forgiveness or Absolution
7 - Communication
8 - See the Dove Fall
9 - Autosacrifice
10 - Timebomb
11 - Azcapotzalco
12 - Xochitlacuicatl
13 - Fire of Love
14 - A New World
15 - Chicome Cipactli
16 - Dry Valley, Antarctica
17 - Blood Consciousness
18 - Lonesome Town

Return to Index