News Archive

Being a cornucopia of items that have fallen off the front page.

May 7th 2010CE: 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 2010CE: Finally! - The New Album "(Batteries Not Invented)" Is Released.

May 1st 2010CE: Added Bonus - Compilation/Outtakes Album "Alien Poo Slime" Published.

Recently I was rummaging around on my old hard disk & found countless (well I couldn't be bothered to count them anyway) odds & ends - songs, pieces of music, absurd scraps of nonsense - which had been abandoned or forgotten over the course of recording The 19 Sounds & Scan Happen.

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Scan Happen, the Tony, Bucking Flair thing & the one pre-2003 track on here, a remix of Year Of The Dog from the now-withdrawn "Natural Freak" album.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 2010CE: 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
rag & a rock
all the king's horses
shoggoths' pseudopods in ectoplasm
catch 23
trans-albionic existential boogie
yog sothoth wants me for an irridescent globule

& I suppose we should play some gigs at some point, shouldn't we?

Regards,
MK.

New site 2009CE

We used to have an all-singing, all-dancing PostNuke site that was very flash & very powerful - but it got hacked, it got cracked, it got accidentally deleted by the ISP (oh how we laughed), or it just plain fell over so many times that it had started to becoming a bit of an embarrassment, if not a liability (The lessons of Web 2.0? As someone wearily said on an anarchist site, "Nothing good ever came of allowing anonymous comments on the internet").

In addition, the rise of identikit band pages & community "social networking" sites, epitomised by MySpace, had made the old site's membership/forum/content management system stuff seem a bit redundant - so visit www.myspace.com/mirrorkill23 & add us as a friend. Frankly you'd have to seem pretty damn scary for us to say no.

(& yes we know Myspace is ghastly.)

This site is therefore intended to be a longer-term & more independant location for our albums & media.