Please engage cloak and land your craft on the field beyond the garden. Please take care to avoid the tractor. Thank you.

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T H E   M U S I C   &

We have the pleasure of living in rural Lancashire in the north west of England. Knott End is a quiet village where country meets the Irish Sea coast and the east bank of the River Wyre. Our garden, rather conveniently, backs on to acres of farmland, and I have a feeling the folk who work it must think I'm something of a big kid, stood by the composting bins at the bottom, excitedly taking photos of the tractor and one of those big noisy things that cuts the grass for use as hay. It was okay when Twizz was a toddler, I had an excuse then. Now I'm a grown up, I try to keep my head down, just in case they think I'm simple. Of course, what they wouldn't have seen from the driving seats were the microphones. That's what you hear after all that lovely Knott End weather and the landing sequence, which unfortunately, I wasn't there to get a photo of. Sod's Law, innit? Confession; the radio conversation from the cockpit of the interdimensional craft was actually re-enacted. Be fair, we couldn't get a microphone on board before it landed. The background noise on the ship was actually a microphone stuffed up our chimney. Sorry...

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We wanted to greet our visitor with a fanfare, not ever day you get a guest from a parallel dimension, is it? Having said that, Skit does outstay his welcome sometimes. Now, one of the great jokes from detractors of the experimental genre is to call it vacuum cleaner music, so we thought we'd fight back, reclaim the insult and use our vacuum cleaner for the fanfare! So we *Blu Tack'd our Sony IC Recorder inside the cowling, just above the dustbag, and let it rip. The tuning was done digitally afterwards, goes right through your head, doesn't it?

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The second track, “You Will Hear The Machines”, is one Skit and I are particularly proud of. So much so that it'll be appearing on a CD compilation soon, we did a special mix for “Godspunk 22” on Pumf Records, the label run by ex-Membranes man, Stan Batcow. For this track, we recorded and made samples from every appliance in the utility room; the boiler, steam iron, tap, tumble dryer (pictured right, complete with Sony IC Recorder and *Blu Tack) and washing machine. Okay, and a bit of vacuum cleaner, just to piss off the critics. You can't have too much vacuum cleaner. We missed the funny electronic squeegy thing that sucks condensation off the windows coz Sam had left it in the wrong room. I know, what kind of monster would do that...
(*other sticky blue shit that takes paint off walls is available)

Amongst the machines in the utility room, Skit was a good lad and helped out with the washing while we recorded it...

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 E L S E W H E R E ;

On to the kitchen / diner to allow our visitor a choice of refreshments, but he just wanted to wallow in nostalgia for his collection of wall-mounted plates, so our hostess contemplated with him, enjoying the sounds of our dehumidifier (above right, complete with Sony IC Recorder), dishwasher, cooker head extractor, kettle, oven fan, microwave and annoying child who ran in while we were recording it!

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The fitted dishwasher - move along now, there's nothing to see here...

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Rather sheepishly, Twizz returned to the living room where she had been watching Lankybox. This was also our visitor's next port of call, much to her annoyance, she likes Lankybox. To us, as parents, this is an enduring mystery, we think it's unwatchable drivel. Honestly, if she puts it on while I'm there, I normally run out of the room shaking uncontrollably and hide in the boiler cupboard. It's these two young guys on You Tube, Adam (the relatively normal one) and Justin (the one who constantly screeches like someone has just hammered a corndog up his butt). They play computer games. And arse about. And you watch them. And Twizz absolutely loves it. Go figure. Our visitor actually had to bribe Twizz with candy to get her to turn it off, he had his eyes set on our Columbia Grafonola...

TV torture: Adam (left), Corndog Boy (right), Sony IC Recorder (top)

CONTINUED