Family of Noise - New Golden Age (1992) C90

Family of Noise was what I did after Illyana Rasputin - same kind of deal but with a slightly different approach to composition. This time if I fucked up, I recorded it again, and kept on doing so until it sounded all right - as opposed to just deciding that'll do and leaving in the mistakes because I'd read somewhere that mistakes were interesting. Having been recording my own stuff for about a decade by this point, I was getting a bit pissed off at the continued failure of my work to translate into cocaine and blow jobs, so Family of Noise - name taken from a shared love of both Luigi Russolo and Dirk Wears White Sox - was a sort of year zero thing, going back to the start and trying to not fuck it up this time. Most of this cassette was recorded in a single week of May 1992, as noted in an audio letter to Tim Griffiths dated to Saturday the 9th of May, 1992:

It's about a quarter past ten and I've had an absolutely brilliant day. I'm on holiday this week, and instead of going away as I was going to do - I was going to go to Glenn's place in Norfolk - I'm going to stay at home. I've borrowed a mountain of stuff - instruments and recording equipment  - from Carl and Andrew. I've been going at the music like nobody's business today. I haven't felt this good in years. I've recorded three unfinished pieces, unfinished because they still require vocals. It's been good stuff. I've been very pleased with it.

The other good news this week is that I got a letter from Paul Mex. He's given me the go-ahead to do a cassette of the very best of Mex, the early years, taken from the cassettes he did in the early eighties which I always thought were brilliant. Earlier today I recorded a cover version of one of his songs as it happens, although it's instrumental only. I won't be able to record vocals on any of this stuff until the end of the week at the earliest when I've mixed all the music down to two channels.

Anyway it's about half past ten now - time for a cup of tea and a fag, read a few comics and then go to bed. Tomorrow I'll be up about six, go for a walk, go to the bottle bank, walk over to Greenwich park, get some inspiration, come back and have breakfast, and then I'll get down to some more recording.

Then in an audio letter to John Powell dated Thursday the 4th of June, 1992, I report:

I was on holiday recently for a week and I was going to go and stay at Glenn's place but I just couldn't get my act together to save up some money for it, so I stayed here and borrowed loads and loads of equipment from Andrew and Carl and spent an entire week recording music. It was a really good week. I really enjoyed it. I'd get up at half past six every day or something ludicrous, then just get out, go for a walk; I've got my bus pass so I would go somewhere I had never been before, then walk around and think about it. It was nice weather that week as well. I'd get a bit of inspiration, come back, have an enormous fried breakfast, and get down to recording at about ten, sometimes working solidly right through until eight at night. I got most of the music for the Family of Noise tape recorded then, including also a version of Have I the Right? by the Honeycombs for the Joe Meek themed compilation that Chainsaw Cassettes are doing. It's probably the worst bit of music I've ever done in my life, but I'm quite proud of it in a funny sort of way. It sounds like a cross between the Bonzo Dog Band and something off the first Psychic TV album.

Back to the Family of Noise tape, I did quite a few cover versions. I had a system of working which was to do a cover version - something I insisted on doing such as Song of the Snake; then an updated version of an old Do Easy track such as Knife in My Side or Kick the Dwarf; then do a new bit, which is just something I'd have roughly worked out like Charlotte or New Face in SE13. I recorded about three tracks a day, and when I'd done that I'd go over to Carl's place and mix them all onto chrome tape, and because Carl's portastudio runs at ordinary tape speed I could then take that tape and add a couple of vocal tracks on what would ordinarily have been the second side. Some of it worked out okay, but I only have a very rough mix at the moment. The vocals on Rain are appalling. The mix will be different on the final thing, as well as the running order because the last two tracks, Theme and Interlude were really just an afterthought and to make up the time on the cassette, because it was the end of the week and I didn't have time to record anything else.

As you will have noticed I did a version of your own Psychosis, which I'm very pleased with actually. I borrowed Andrew's sampler and managed to lift some of the original sounds from your tape. I've been listening to your tapes and have only just realised you did a vocal version, because what I did was lift phrases from your letters and use those, to do nothing is to do everything which was something you said of Sid Watches Telly, that sort of thing.

Some of the stuff could be better, I mean in the case of tracks like Knife in My Side and Within These Walls. They're both quite old and I could have changed the lyrics because they're not quite appropriate to me in 1992, but I couldn't be bothered, so they're more or less the same as they were first time around.

That's probably more information than you really need. To condense it further, Knife in My Side, Kick the Dwarf, Within These Walls, and Mеня Зовут Яд are revised versions of old Do Easy tracks, the latter having originally been titled Image Control; Into the Valley covers a classic by Mex rather than the Skids, and Rain was originally written and recorded by Exhibit A and appeared on The Thing from the Crypt compilation on Mex's Dead Hedgehog label (still available here); the Virgin Prunes-esque Song of the Snake was my cover of the superior Thomas Frenzi original, and was apparently about Porridge based on some unfortunate personal experience; Psychosis and Tin Men were similarly covers of songs by people whose fame was about equivalent to my own, tape-wise, respectively John Powell of Hoax! zine with his musical hat on, and Paul Mercer of Envy - who appear elsewhere on this blog.

As noted above, I never actually finished this tape in that this was never intended to be the final mix. I think I just began to feel a bit self-conscious about having borrowed Carl's portastudio for probably a year or more, so when I gave it back and failed to buy one of my own, New Golden Age was pretty much forgotten. I suppose it's a shame, maybe. I still quite like some of this, or at least the ideas were decent, if not the execution. You can probably tell I was listening to the Severed Heads quite a bit.

As for what any of it's about: mostly about it having been a great many years since I'd previously had sex with a naked lady and my frustration with this sorry state of affairs, about what total knob's certain people were (my friend Rajun's girlfriend and her SWP pals in the case of Charlotte, then a fanzine editor and some guy from a band I was in - but not Glenn or Carl, obviously) in the case of Life's Mistake; and about attempting to remain optimistic despite reasons as to why this might seem foolish in the case of the title track.

Download the seventeen tracks and inlay card by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Theme
2 - Into the Valley
3 - Sometimes I...
4 - Knife in My Side
5 - Song of the Snake
6 - New Face in SE13
7 - Kick the Dwarf
8 - Psychosis
9 - New Golden Age
10 - Interlude
11 - Mеня Зовут Яд
12 - Rain
13 - Mean Streets
14 - Within These Walls
15 - Tin Men
16 - Charlotte
17 - Life's Mistake

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Manslaüghter - South of Hebburn (1993) C30

Those regularly suckling at the teat of musical adequacy which is this blog will already know the name of Manslaüghter. If not, it's all here and I don't see why I should have to repeat myself.

South of Hebburn builds upon the solid foundations laid out on the first cassette, taking the genre of furniture metal into new, unexplored, and immeasurably faster and more terrifying realms, as you will hear on classic tracks such as Sofa Bed of Doom and The Fitted Kitchen Related Cattle Mutilation Mystery. They seemed a bit more at home in the studio on this one, and had become pretty tight live as well, if the last four tracks here are any indication - all recorded at the Old Mill, Ferryhill, Co. Durham on Saturday 5th of December, 1992, it says here.

God - what I would have given to have heard this lot on vinyl.

Download all eight songs and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Empty Wardrobe
2 - The Fitted Kitchen Related Cattle Mutilation Mystery
3 - The Vinyl Frontier
4 - Sofa Bed of Doom
5 - Doorway of Entry
6 - Broken Strings
7 - Gene Simmons Codpiece
8 - Manslaüghter

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Dovers - Rehearsals 4.2 & 5+ (1987) C60

There are already about a million free Dovers tapes on this blog so they shouldn't really require further introduction or explanation; and this is another one of those tapes which might be of interest if you were actually in the group, but there's otherwise no real reason for you to care about it. That said, I was in the group, and even I haven't listened to this one since probably 1987.

Actually, that's possibly not entirely true. You might conceivably experience a few seconds of curiosity if you were one of the people interviewed on the first track, which seems to just about justify this thing as a free download; not that I really need such justification. In the spring of 1987 I was coming to the end of my three year degree at Maidstone College of Art and had somehow managed to remain effectively unemployable, which made the prospect of life out in the real world terrifying. I therefore put myself up for nomination for president of the student union on the grounds that it would warrant some form of extension to my grant and mean I could spend another year bumming around college hoping to eventually achieve sexual intercourse. It had worked for Carl - the singing Dover - who had been president of the student union during my first year, and he'd spent most of the time beating them off with a shitty stick. Unfortunately I was up against Nick Shaddick who had a much better idea of what the job entailed and of what he was talking about, so he won, which was probably for the best. My research - or at least my equivalent of Hillary Clinton kissing babies and opening new branches of Taco Bell - had been to shove a tape recorder under the noses of friends and acquaintances and ask them what it would take to secure their vote, and the first track comprises their answers. In order of appearance, those you can hear were: Martin de Sey, Garreth Roberts, Ian Elliott, Neil McLeod (who we auditioned as drummer at one stage, but he didn't seem to like our music very much) with the golden tonsils of Nicola Percy at work in the background, Niki Medlik, Trisha (some friend of Niki, can't remember her second name), Gill Ewington, Andy someone-or-other-from-the-sculpture-department, Karl Foster, a couple of blokes from the painting department - one of whom might have been called Pete, Kirsten van Schreven, and Lynne Blackburn.

As for the other shit on here, tracks 2 and 3 were recorded at Carl's place in Bermondsey on the 14th November, 1987, and the rest was at my place in Chatham on the the 11th December, 1987; except for the guitar instrumentals which were just me.

So there you go; and it's still better than the entire Radiohead back catalogue. Enjoy. Don't enjoy. Whatever. Knock yourself out.

Download the sixteen tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Lawrence on the Campaign Trail
2 - Havin' a Laugh
3 - Do the Frug
4 - Havin' a Laugh
5 - Fatback
6 - A.I.D.X.
7 - The Insect
8 - B.L.A.C.Clowns
9 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burning
10 - Are You My Mother?
11 - Is This Recording?
12 - Fatback (guitar instrumental)
13 - Misery List (guitar instrumental)
14 - The Insect (guitar instrumental)
15 - Batman's Personal Friend (guitar instrumental)
16 - Beat Me Black & Blue (guitar instrumental)

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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

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v/a - Moraals (1985) 2C90

I'd already done one compilation tape, and I wanted to do another, but an hour just didn't seem long enough to include stuff from all the people I knew, either by mail or in person; so a double C90 set it was, and I figured I may as well throw in some sort of accompanying booklet of band artwork seeing as that was what everyone else had been doing, or at least what Larry Peterson had been doing. By the time it all eventually came together I had moved out of my parents' place and was half way through taking a degree at Maidstone College of Art, and the thing had been dragging on for ages. My enthusiasm was therefore probably a little diminished, although honestly it probably didn't make a lot of difference. The thing was always going to be what it was, although I gather certain contributors were somehow shocked when their contributor copies turned up in the post, having somehow garnered the impression that I was some kind of luxuriously funded arts institute and individual copies of Moraals were to be presented as 180g collectors' vinyl discs encased within a hand crafted marble lecturn supporting a hardbound edition of artwork pressed in gold leaf on hand crafted paper. I was fucking eighteen and financed by pocket money, a paper round, and then a student grant, most of which I spent on beer and fags. It was the best I could manage at the time, and bollocks because I still think it sounds pretty great. The "booklet" was actually hand photocopied sheets inside an artisan clear plastic envelope of the kind purchased in packs of twenty from WHSmiths, but then I wasn't going to blow half my grant at the printers without some sort of indication that people might actually buy the thing. I sold a few copies as I recall, but not many, although my publicity machine was kind of winding down by that point. Yes, that's probably the reason.

Anyway, here's the lot - all three fucking hours of it split into two separate downloads so as not to clog up your internet connection and spoil the enjoyment of anyone who happens to be watching episodes of Ice Road Truckers on Netflix in the next room. The cassette cover - as designed by Klive Humberstone of Tex Mirror H, who also suggested the title - is included with the second download, and both cassettes had the same cover, in case you were wondering why there only seems to be one of them. Also included in the second download is a folder containing scans of all of the booklet artwork I have at my disposal. The pages for Mex and Opera For Infantry are missing as they all featured naughty pictures which I felt uneasy about stuffing into my luggage when I flew back to England to retrieve this material, and I'm not sure there ever was any Family Patrol Group artwork.

Mex produced some of the greatest pop music ever recorded so far as I was concerned, and it was a great moment when he sent me a tape for my compilation. I would have punched the air if I'd been American back then. He is still in existence today, and you should conduct further investigations here.; Trilogy was my friend Thomas Docherty (not to be confused with etc. etc.), author of some of the greatest weirdy sounds of that whole era, and I'll be ripping some more of his old tapes once I can rescue them from across the seas but if you're unable to wait, have a rummage in his YouTube channel.; Members of Tex Mirror H achieved wider recognition as In The Nursery and, as I say, Klive provided the cover and title of this compilation. They also had a track on an Adventures In Reality compilation.; Saul Pol Koatep was half of AOT 418 who released tapes through both myself and Anal Probe and others. I think they had something to do with the New Blockaders, and Saul was behind the Hypnagogia label, if anyone remembers that.; Do Easy was obviously myself, apparently trying hard to turn into John Cougar Mellencamp at the time of recording, although I definitely don't remember it as a conscious ambition. Still, the other two tracks are all right, I suppose.; The RSM, standing for Rob, Shend, and Mart, were an improvised music project initiated by my friend Martin, who also contributed as Mart E. Knee. The Shend and the Rob in question were Cravats and later Very Things whom Martin knew fairly well, having been a founding member of the former. Martin's YouTube channel can be found here.; Scram Ju Ju was David Lebens-Wankling, formerly of Urge with the semi-legendary Kevin Harrison, and whom I first encountered as a contributor to Gary Levermore's Rising from the Red Sand compilation. Apparently I was the first person to write to him as a result of the Third Mind tape, which is kind of depressing. He should have done a song about a murderer or summink.; Anarchist Angels were a bloke called Steve from Sunbury-on-Thames plus friends, and their As the Innocent Suffer tape remains one of my all time anarchopunk faves and is as such due for a ripping just as soon as I can get hold of my copy. Steve's tracks are probably my personal favourites of the whole compilation, possibly excepting those by Opera For Infantry, who of course later scared the living shit out of everyone as the Grey Wolves. Trev said something in his letter like we were feeling a bit sad when we recorded this stuff, and he's probably ashamed of it these days, but I still think these two tracks are wonderful. I also have a tape of Opera For Infantry rehearsing as a punk band with guitar, drums, and Trev yelping about TV standing for technological valium - just trying something different, and another one for the retrieval list.; Thee Unkommuniti, as you're probably aware, was Tim who later achieved wider recognition with Stereolab, of whom you can hear formative traces in this stuff if you listen closely. Vinyl-on-Demand put out a boxed set of Unkommuniti material a while back, but it costs about a million quid and anyway I still have all the tapes, thank you very much.; Lead Shoes were two Steves from my degree course, one of whom was much nicer than the other one and with whom I am still in touch on friendface. I think he's some sort of dance/techno luminary these days.; Also from my degree course was Paul Mercer who named his thing after a phrase in an article about bats which described them as Acrobatic Champions. For some reason he found this funny, but then he was kind of gothic in certain respects, and I always thought his music was excellent - in fact I still do, even though apparently we hate each other's guts these days - and there is some more of it here.; NKVD is Glenn from Konstruktivists who sent me these early versions of tracks which ended up on Black December.; I started writing to Family Patrol Group after I saw them supporting Whitehouse in Birmingham. They had split by the time I was putting together this compilation, but Colin suggested I lift some sections of noise from their tape Fear Death By Water, which was what I did.; and the rest were mostly people I was writing to or swapping tapes with at the time.

Download the twenty-two tracks of the first tape by clicking on this link...

Tracks:
1 - (introduction)
2 - Mex - The Kid is a Little Monster
3 - Trilogy - Do Not Forgive Them
4 - Tex Mirror H - Out of Reach
5 - Saul Pol Koatep - Thou Shalt Not Kill
6 - Morris Dolby & the Bouncy Lobster Band - Len Fairclough
7 - Human Trapped Rhythms - Fish Tale
8 - Tryouts - Superior Human Beings
9 - Do Easy - Inspecting the Experimental Grain Fields at Ostia Near Rome
10 - The RSM - Rounds A No. 14
11 - Scram Ju Ju - After All
12 - Anarchist Angels - One in a Million
13 - Help! Help! I've Got My Head Stuck Down the Bog! - I'm In Love (With My Lavatory)
14 - Unkommuniti - Winterkill
15 - Do Easy - Nobody Can Describe How We Truly Feel
16 - David James - Pooh Disease
17 - Lead Shoes - Baseball on Sunday
18 - Anarchist Angels - Sick But A Shepherd
19 - NKVD - Eastern Vein III
20 - Acrobatic Champions - Three Minutes
21 - Scram Ju Ju - Ruled by the Heart
22 - Opera For Infantry - Time Is...

...and download the second tape, cover and booklet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - David James - Untitled
2 - Tryouts - If You Take Advantage of Me
3 - Human Trapped Rhythms -The Message (Roll Down and Die)
4 - Tex Mirror H - Absorption
5 - Family Patrol Group - Extreme Nature
6 - Mart E. Knee - Bone Structure
7 - Unkommuniti - To Us Unseen
8 - Anarchist Angels - Untitled
9 - Do Easy - Our Tune
10 - Opera For Infantry - It's Later Than It's Ever Been
11 - Lead Shoes - Sniffing Glue
12 - WEOJ - Pyromania
13 - Family Patrol Group - The Fight Is On
14 - Acrobatic Champions - Order and Disorder
15 - Cause For Concern - Me Mucking About
16 - Anarchist Angels - Force His Mind
17 - NKVD - Eastern Vein IV
18 - Do Easy - Pair of Trousers
19 - AOT 418 - Beckie's Mission
20 - Morris Dolby & the Bouncy Lobster Band - Eggy Soldiers
21 - Family Patrol Group - Fear Death by Water
22 - Mex - Simplicity

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Do Easy - The Twelfth Metal Tape (1983) C60

Another one which wasn't much good I'm afraid; and with hindsight I continue to notice themes which weren't so obvious at the time. If The Sixth Metal Tape was my media album - as proposed in a previous blog entry - and The Ninth Metal Tape was a concept album about sexuality and fear of molestation, if you squint a bit, then this was the theatrical album. I was at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education retaking the 'O' levels I'd been too thick to obtain at school, plus some new subjects such as drama. My drama class split into two groups towards the end of the academic year, and each one wrote and produced its own play as part of our course work. The other group came up with a play called Everybody is Someone - or something of the sort titled so as to more or less give away both the entire story and the conclusion towards which it frogmarched its audience at gunpoint before anyone had even sat down; and my bunch came up with the similarly understated Victory For Who?, because if you really want to understand the horror of war, who better to ask than a self-involved teenager?

Anyway, we wrote this thing and put it on for an audience and I did the sound, which allowed me access to the college sound room and a lovely TEAC reel-to-reel on which I could make echo effects. With the exception of Song this tape comprises an audio recording of our performance, sound effects material I cobbled together for the same, and stuff derived from my pissing about with the TEAC. One of them is named after a painting by Adolf Hitler, which is really playful and subversive blah blah blah...

Victory For Who? was produced and performed by Helen Barnard, Addi Harris, Mark Langston, Stella Gill, Richard Jones, and myself, and the download includes a transcription of the script as a PDF - which you should be able to read on a Kindle if you feel so inclined - mainly because the audio recording is impossible to follow. I'm no longer in touch with any of the other five and I have no idea what happened to any of them, but I figured that if any of them should Google either the play or any of the names involved, being able to read the thing should at least compensate for the sound quality, possibly. Keep in mind however that we were all about seventeen, so if you're reading this as some massive theatre producer on the look out for the next Waiting For Godot, don't get your hopes up.

Download the tape, inlay card and eBook by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - South African Power Corporation
2 - Song
3 - Don't Trust Anyone
4 - In the Ruins of Becelaere
5 - Warfare
6 - Your Wife...
7 - Victory For Who? (live audio recording 17/5/83)
8 - Tortion

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621 Monosodium 621 - We, Torn from the Earth by Wonders of Gold (1992) C15+

Back in 1992, both Paul Condon - editor of Gneurosis - and myself had been subject to visitation by a fanzine editor to whom I shall cryptically refer as Jeremy Beadle because he was a fan of the same. Jeremy Beadle came to stay with me and slept on my sofa for a couple of nights but soon began to get on my tits, at which point I fobbed him off on Paul Condon and his sofa, like a true pal. Amazingly Paul was still speaking to me afterwards, so I suppose he understood, and on the positive side we subsequently had a whale of a time comparing notes and discussing how annoying we found Jeremy Beadle over beers and ciggies. Then one Saturday afternoon we went to some kind of free festival in New Cross, the one held annually in that park behind the Venue at the end of Clifton Ride - as it is misnamed in S. Alexander Reed's shit book about industrial music. There were crusty bands and there was beer and it was a nice day, and the conversation soon turned to Jeremy Beadle and his annoyingness. The thing that had really got to me about his visit, as I explained, was his diet. He wouldn't eat anything. Every night I'd cook something - spaghetti bolognese or curry or whatever, and I'm really not a bad cook.

'How much of this do you want, Jeremy Beadle?' I would ask.

'Oh I'm fine,' he would say, smiling as he pulled a family size bag of fucking Monster Munch and a litre bottle of Pepsi from his back pack.

Paul and I realised that neither of us had ever seen him eat anything other than crisps or related potato-based snacks generally marketed at school children, and this made us howl with laughter for most of the rest of the afternoon, culminating in Paul proposing we get t-shirts made - a picture of a packet of crisps with the legend Crisps - My Favourite! I'm not even really sure why it made us laugh so much, but it did.

Meanwhile I was toying with the idea of recording sarcastic power electronics, an idea which found itself split into two, one branch leading here, and the other to 621 Monosodium 621, but with those three little magickal dots around the numbers like you have on Current 93 records. Paul had an expensive sampler and was an accomplished violinist, and the idea was to record something with all of the usual fixations of the industrial or whatever the fuck you want to call it genre - Manson, Crowley, Hitler, and potato-derived snack foods. We both also found neofolk unintentionally amusing, so 621 Monosodium 621 - named after everyone's favourite flavour enhancer - was firing off in a number of directions all at once whilst going out of its way to take itself extremely seriously.

We convened one Saturday afternoon around my place in Lewisham, beginning with a trip to Sainsburys from which we returned with two carrier bags each full of snack foods, fizzy pop and so on. We sampled ourselves eating crisps over and over, and different kinds of crisps, cheese footballs and so on in pursuit of variant sounds. We recorded Wheaties - a tubular snack - played as atonal instruments by blowing across one end as though they were pan pipes. We sampled and looped cans of cola popped open for rhythm. We mixed all of this together with guitar and effects and Adolf Hitler and the humble potato as a mystic avatar of revelation 'n' shit, and we ended up with the material comprising this download. I drew a picture of Roman soldiers eating crisps before an inverted Christ on the cross; and I seem to recall Paul writing a brilliantly impenetrable essay about the role of potatoes in human magickal history, although I'm no longer sure whether this happened or was simply an idea; and I intended to put it out as a C15, but somehow lost the impetus. So eventually I just made a couple of copies for Paul and myself.

We might have ended up on Top of the Pops, or at least on the flip side of a Current 93 album, but never mind. Possibly the only thing we achieved was a cure for the desire to eat crisps ever again for at least the next few months.

Anyway, here are all four tracks, plus a couple of variant mixes I found I had laying around and which I think I prefer. Enjoy and take very, very seriously, preferably whilst scowling and marching up and down in front of a Bavarian castle whilst munching away on a bag of Wotsits.

Download the six tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - 621 Monosodium 621
2 - NaCl/HNO3
3 - Monosodium 666
4 - Boiled Alive in Oil of Sunflower
5 - 621 Monosodium 621 (early version)
6 - Boiled Alive (early mix)

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