The 19 Sounds To Tap Into Reality MKCD005 2004CE
 click here [85.2mb zip] to download the whole album in high quality 192Kbps MP3, complete with printable inlay in pdf format; or click on a song title to read lyrics for individual songs, & play them in lower quality 96Kbps MP3, which will open in a new window/tab.
Four things you need to realise in order to understand The 19 Sounds:
1) It was largely written in 2003. The "War on Terror" was well under way & the world had started to resemble a parody of an X-Files episode. I wanted to write about this directly, but didn't know where to start.
2) 2003 was a long, hot summer - & it was the first time in my life that I've ever really enjoyed that sort of heat.
3) I was listening to an awful lot of Captain Beefheart. At his weirdest.
4) Magic Mushrooms were suddenly back on the menu again, legally available from our local market.
Under these circumstances, this was the first time I'd ever recorded, engineered & mixed an entire album. We'd just finished the (no-longer-available) Natural Freak album at Lancaster's Musician's Co-Op; I wasn't entirely happy with the results, but it had certainly been an educational experience... we dropped the old drum machine & started sequencing drums & synths on the laptop, which we were able to get to sound far more natural & realistic thanks to some randomised quantization & decent wavetable synthesis. This made us sound more like a "real band" than we had previously...
But it all has this weird, shifting, hallucinatory heat-haze quality to it. It's quite the most psychedelic music I've ever recorded, from a production point of view; & the Beefheart influences came to the fore in the shifting, clashing rhythms that characterise this album. Add in some cut-up lyrics & an awesome software-based guitar amp, & the results were far & away my proudest achievement at that time.
& no one got it.
Various people outside the band listened to it, some even reviewed it, but their comments all seemed based on the last, & least comprehensible, half of the album. Dan Rathbone commented at the time that had we bracketed tracks 7-16 together under the heading "The Long Dark Noodle Of The Soul", it would have been a little more apparent that this album was half "proper songs" & half entertaining experimentalism. He was dead right too.
Beefheart, the Silly 'Cybin & the heat had sent me off into a world of my own, & this album is avant garde in a big way. Between the angular, argumentative songs & the prog-influenced instrumentals are songs without words, songs with words that make no sense unless you realise that the person writing them is trying to avoid big, painful topics; & even, in one case, a track in the form of a script for a non-existent play.
So bear this in mind when listening.
you drone, & pale
attempt the 19 sounds but
you're doomed to fail
your feet don't ever touch the ground
prophecy is theft I say
religion is the old ploy of the masters
here's history's greatest give-away
in £10 Marx & Engels vouchers
they must refill your broken cup
& help you keep your pecker up
you can't deny it must be tricky
to keep the future sweet & sticky
when just a spoonful of artificial sweetener
will help that medicine go down
ingredients without a name
my fortune's laced with serial numbers
aspartame is part of me
feeding & creating hungers
they always keep the stocks in
of your choice of neural toxin
so bow down now before the saviour
who keeps the future chocolate flavoured
Yes indeed, ladies & gentlemen:
New Candy Portents can make even the most depressing & dead-end of circumstances sound like beacons of opportunity, shining in the darkness, leading to: your perfect job, your perfect love; your place in the scheme of things. All your feelings of dread & alienation will be gone!
All you have to do -
Is Consume.
now there was a time when nights were dark & silence went unbroken
but those days are gone, like the chemical scum that flows down to the ocean
the wooden bones all spectral white in the psilocybin sun
but soon the humans will be back to end what they've begun
so bless your lucky stars, how can you frown?
when another fcuking road has come to town
if you go down to the woods today you'll find they're obsolete
'cos they've cordoned off what's yours & mine & filled it up with concrete
so bless your lucky stars how can you frown?
when another fcuking road has come to town
& it feels just like the others bearing down
see the goddess in her nice new shiny concrete gown
I might believe in anything, if I could make it all stand still
but the mysteries keep moving & it's making me feel ill
take my time trying to track the trickle of the truth
just to find it isn't possible providing perfect proof
& when I think I've finally got my finger on a fact
doubt almighty has come to save me
met a man named Michael he said his god's the best
& that I'd soon be sailing off to satan with the rest
& I said "maybe there's no Jesus, just the devil when he's stoned"
& I think he got the message 'cos he left me well alone
so if you're cornered by a mormon or getting shitness from a witness
doubt almighty will come to save you
so am I worrying about nothing while sitting by myself?
'cos I'm skeptical of everything especially doubt itself
to the untrained eye it may appear that I'm deranged
but if you ask me it's true belief that's really fucking strange
so when your life is threatened by perfection, just remember
that a happy end may be happy - but it's still an end
05 marshall mcLuhan (what you doin'?) [3:44 2.6MB MP3]
kick off your shoes & climb inside your TV again
a media junkie part owned by the marketing men
the ones who control us are nothing but eager to please
but that's when you realise that you've lived your life on your knees
Marshall McLuhan, watch what you're doing to me
we are doomed to live your prophecy
& the hardwired man is never truly free
as we become our new technology
existence on hold while you aim for the goals that they set
& will you get the same 19 minutes of fame as the rest?
now your life is a mess but there's nobody left to accuse
just the love of a female by email, there's nothing to lose
06 church of the perpetually confused [3:02 2.1MB MP3]
...welcome to mirrorkill's outer discordian church of the perpetually confused...
Meagre policy note: Agog Operation.
The lesser officers poured time on top of the disaster women, offering in return injuries, & enough money to buy abandoned territorial integrity.
Many will cheer openly at discussing a subject that fantastic. Fools! Their police-state daily war idea is lethargic, showing signs of masonic ignominy. Supporting countries debate America's journey towards predictable entry by the Reichstag, galvanising conspiracy trackers.
The order's predictions of itself united with the other will come to pass after its long-neglected & impossible world-mounting attempt at narrative. Didn't they harvest all those curious Oil Deaths?
We find governance in things, after the obsession with faces.
why feed even our teachers, who are not immune to the world
on the bands & teenage girls of today?
they get to teach the pulled-up body the obvious fact that she is
store merchandise, old matter
carrying important, universally recognised brand-name mania
a cute child does not have peers & pressure is a novelty
but she needs these labels to stay that way...
calling the powers of girls who spend hours
on drowning themselves in arrangements of flowers
the strong are admired, but the victims desired
& everyone everywhere seems to be mired
in opheliaphilia
she has given birth to lip gloss, hair accessories
movies & nick-nacks, sewn onto her
& the culture is one with multitudes of people
keeping her doing it with a minimum of explanation
I've had my fill o'ya, ophelia
(instrumental)
10 british snobbishness minister [1:55 1.3MB MP3]
Vacuumed everything he said, this collector of extremely difficult shoes, a shrunken trust which would probably be classed as research today. Five times former monarch & part philanthropist, he amassed more height & Nightingale's Peruvian Heads.
He found the medicine of his birth in objects to sum up rooms, to mark a hundred organisations that we never fully see.
Behold, the rivers of money & politics! in which there is self worship & the psychological equivalent of your father being president. The popular suppose it terrifying when thousands ignore us, but failing accuracy, my most laden innocent, I truly have to bomb, cajoled to play within those illegal weapons of mass destruction.
In the end we smelt possibility lost, individual & institutional. We were reborn, a substance for survival, a world of inner selves with which to grace the Theatres of Ash.
Tightening the gender fall-out shelter, the government is literally pushing buttons. Examination of the holy sweat-shops & security policies keeps the nuclear family from spilling, & the plethora of goods is also re-establishing its dominance. Holding the poor accountable for unabated bureau statistics practises, trapped in feeding itself faulty scenarios, it snaps the wall like an ascetic.
Important luxuries remain to safeguard compatibility with America, but the continuous lies told to these casualties were for the purpose of greater fear.
11 (we are) mutant industrial jazz-punk monkeys [2:31 1.7MB MP3]
(instrumental)
MK: Christ was into this weird, old-testament stuff, brutal & relentless, no sex.
Dan: It's sort of strange that that isn't God's plan.
Dianah: What, the madness of exhibition?
Dan: Well, they're bone dealers, wealthy men designed to be worn by entrepreneurs, all fortune-telling pharmaceuticals & protruding trust marks.
MK: Yes, a wacky fundamentalist group with a weird hipster/puritanical view. Several are public backers of ignorance, got no sympathy for the curious.
Dianah: I suppose they're making a new demise for the pickett-fences class? The first city is doomed!
MK: Well, I write about them, posing as their documents. It's a people hoax, the political avant-garde, right there in the crafted "real".
Dan: Yesterday, something danced, giddy & naked, through my mind, but it wasn't me; animating the images in my head into strange & playful new life.
MK: Stranger things have happened. 19 to be precise. A Shoggoth eating Mi-Go in a polyethelene bag is slow'n'squamous, got me?
(written by MK & Dan Rathbone)
Fatuous over Paris: stupid, spoiled, superficial socialite creepers raid the brain department, where cabin fever & vacant Big Sports sit there, silently staring straight ahead, naked women in their faces & soup kitchens. An estimated inheritance struggles to be slender - so the fabulous song goes. Pretty as famed for chock full of antics & the fear factor as the beautiful people urge us to kick sand in hunting hearts, & splay their moral lips like a disclosed pornographic ex-boyfriend, who probably acts the gleeful feeding frenzy.
We brain around or wrinkle for generation. Each passing year most famous nerves may be on just plain root, or highly divine justice, punishing the universal. Apocryphal her promotional interviews for the almighty buck. The story is better than watching their faces, or the chops of the undoing betrayal.
Licking the rich eagerly, since there's nothing cute about a burning desire to spit poison behind you. Just watch the simple babe pellets. Unconscious Primal Pout Gatherers! We are now everyone at the same time! Overnight we contract the village further, dissolved magic in which we simply reconstitute the world.
(instrumental)
(instrumental (sort of) - written by MK & Dianah)
(instrumental)
17 4 chords (& a head full of bollocks) [3:39 2.5MB MP3]
creation is addiction, reality's restriction
but I can't make it go away
& when these songs are done this world is still a bitter one
& it really doesn't matter what I say
my signal's faint & too erratic, pissing in the wind of static
communication is problematic
we may both be enlightened but we've got no common zens -
I've just got
4 chords, & a head full of bollocks
4 chords, that's all that I need
one more would be too sentimental
& any less could not express
the emptiness between the word and deed
so just carry on without me, don't ever think about me
forget I ever said a word
it's just that nothing's true & I really don't know what to do but
make like you never even heard
why are we so scared of silence, of life without this sonic violence?
you can leave - I give you license
we may both be enlightened but we've got no common zens
well it might sound funny but it wasn't supposed to be me
'cos I was destined for the life of luxury
and it might sound strange but I really wasn't meant to fall down
when I've been holding it together for so long now
so what do you want from me?
I've given all I can - you can't ask no more of any man
I lost the key, I don't believe in me
& you are all I have, I don't care no more, won't take no chances
I lost the key - do you believe in me?
well my head's still spinning so you'll have to pardon me
but it all seems to be an exercise in mediocrity
& it doesn't seem right that our lives go on the way we would have been
when I ain't much taken with the things that life has got to offer me
(instrumental)
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