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Albums - The 19 Sounds To Tap Into Reality MKCD005 2004
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. 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. 01 overture : dronex [4:21 3.0MB MP3]you drone, & pale 02 candy portents [4:19 3.0MB MP3]prophecy is theft I say Yes indeed, ladies & gentlemen: 03 another fcuking road [3:00 2.1MB MP3]now there was a time when nights were dark & silence went unbroken 04 doubt almighty [3:17 2.3MB MP3]I might believe in anything, if I could make it all stand still 05 marshall mcLuhan (what you doin'?) [3:44 2.6MB MP3]kick off your shoes & climb inside your TV again 06 church of the perpetually confused [3:02 2.1MB MP3]...welcome to mirrorkill's outer discordian church of the perpetually confused... 07 new war on forms [1:43 1.2MB MP3]Meagre policy note: Agog Operation. 08 opheliaphilia [3:25 2.3MB MP3]why feed even our teachers, who are not immune to the world 09 curators of the moon [2:38 1.8MB MP3](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. 11 (we are) mutant industrial jazz-punk monkeys [2:31 1.7MB MP3](instrumental) 12 slow'n'squamous [1:04 0.8MB MP3]MK: Christ was into this weird, old-testament stuff, brutal & relentless, no sex. 13 formula of the beholder [3:06 2.1MB MP3](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. 14 tunnelface [3:53 2.7MB MP3](instrumental) 15 wordless blues [2:48 1.9MB MP3](instrumental (sort of) - written by MK & Dianah) 16 plateau of the sun [2:59 2.1MB MP3](instrumental) 17 4 chords (& a head full of bollocks) [3:39 2.5MB MP3]creation is addiction, reality's restriction 18 born jaded [4:33 3.1MB MP3]well it might sound funny but it wasn't supposed to be me 19 coda: the 19th sound [7:17 5.0MB MP3](instrumental) | May 7th 2010: Live Twitter Feed Pulled, FB "Like" button on notice.We'd been experimenting with a twitter feed, using a script to pull in "tweets" (ugh) live from the server to a box on the right hand side of the page. Unfortunately relying on the Twitter server's responsiveness was having an impact on the rendering speed of this page, hence it's been removed. The feed itself is still there, but frankly we've been underwhelmed by the whole concept (expecting MK to express any idea worth expressing in 140 characters or fewer is just unrealistic) so it may well fall into complete disuse. We advise you to subscribe to the mailing list instead for notifications when the site is updated. We've also added a Facebook "Like" button, as you can see. While we're all on Facebook, we're increasingly creeped out by it - just like you. But we've heard rumours that, if Zuckerberg gets his way, this form of "social" linking may replace the standard hypertext anchor as the default mechanism of the web, which may mean it can't be ignored. (Plus it might, conceivably, piss on Google's chips, which is always a plus). We may ignore it anyway. We'll see. If it gets much use it may stay. May 1st 2010: Finally! - The New Album "(Batteries Not Invented)" Is Released.
May 1st 2010: Added Bonus - Compilation/Outtakes Album "Alien Poo Slime" Published.
In some cases it was blindingly obvious why. But in others some gems had been cruelly ignored for reasons which either didn't look so good in retrospect or are long forgotten. This reminded me of my half-arsed idea some while back to compile a few rather fine remixes from Scan Happen, the Tony, Bucking Flair thing & the one pre-2003 track on here, a remix of Year Of The Dog from the now-withdrawn "Natural Freak" album. So consider this release a summing up, if you will; a tying up of loose ends. A final squeeze of the rind of Mirrorkill - The Electric Years. It's patchy & it's entertaining & it's occasionally incoherent & it's experimental & it's potentially incriminating & it's funny. The esteemed Dan "The Bass" Rathbone has supplied, to my specifications, this fabulous artwork, in homage to the infamous Phi Zappa Krappa posters. I've been giggling for hours. & where does the name come from, you ask? A place you don't ever want to go, my friend, that's where. May 1st 2010: Ongoing Projects.Regarding the first two Mirrorkill albums "Shaming of the True" & "Natural Freak"; I find them very hard to listen to now. They were recorded & engineered, very well I might add, by the mighty Ian Dicken at Lancaster Musicians' Co Op. However, as I was paying for the studio time (even if it was only a tenner an hour) I wound up calling them finished before I was ready. In the time since then I've taken to recording & engineering for myself, at home, on a laptop; & I can (& do) take years over them. But there are a lot of fine, well-loved songs on there that we still play today, acoustically, & it seems a shame for them not to have a home on the internet. So I've begun a project to re-record the best songs off these two albums in our current acoustic idiom. Goodness knows how long it will take, but it will be worth it. It will be entitled: "Portrait of the Artist Formerly Known as a Young Man". Also in the pipeline is a new album tentatively named "Worker" (although the last two albums have been tentatively named "Worker" until I thought of a better joke, so who knows?). Current song titles include but are not limited to: pentacles, tentacles, wallet & watch & I suppose we should play some gigs at some point, shouldn't we? Regards, | |||||
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