Our Columbia Grafonola, we can dig the rebop, daddio...

0

And here's one we did earlier! We'd actually recorded the Columbia Grafonola through a whole cycle, from hand-cranking 'til the coil-spring ran out, placing a couple of condenser microphones inside the wooden housing, especially for one of Shaun Robert's musique concrète compilations last summer, which has not yet been released. So we dropped a loop sample from that on to a trip hop beat and added a 'tune' with one of those rechargeable small vacuum cleaners that Sam had left in the living room instead of putting it away properly. I know, what kind of monster would do that? The fizzing sound you can hear are two Solpadeine (*other painkillers are available) dissolving in a plastic beaker. We had to give them to our visitor for the headache he'd got from watching Lankybox with Twizz. Thank fuck for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (*oh, come on, nothing comparable is available)!

0

See? Magic Bullet HAVE got fans! Allow this one to blow you up the stairs, past the wall that obscures your view of the house next door to the bathroom, may the waters run through its pipes for ever more. Hear the joys of the sink filling, the shower and the toilet flushing. If you listen to the watery bit that forms the main part of the track through headphones, it's great for the wonderful phenomenon of pareidolia, I keep hearing the words “Ricky Star” and “Sacred heart”, give it a try!

0

Although we did have a butterfly by Sam's reading light for moral support, we were initially uninspired here. There's not really many things in the bedroom that make noise (that I won't get slapped for mentioning)! So this one was a happy accident when Sam messed up her lines and said “it is for sleeps and dreams”, it just sounded so cute that Skit and I looked at each other and shouted “MAGIC BULLET LULLABY!”  It's just my electric shaver and its little charging / cleaning station alternating with a pounding drumbeat and occasional man screaming, it is a lullaby after all. Sweet dreams. 

Raiding Twizz's toy box for “They Visit Her At Night”

0

When it came to our daughter's bedroom, luckily for us, Twizz is something of a hoarder and still had a lot of musical toys she'd kept from her toddler days. These were absolutely perfect for what we had in mind! The faerie voices mostly come from the toy guitar (it kind of sings a lead solo and giggles at the end of it), but were pitch-shifted and chorused to give them more of an eerie little people vibe. The main melody was put together from individually pitch-shifted samples of the toy trumpet, which may have an impressive three valves, but I can assure you only plays one note.

0

Finally, Sam brings our visitor here into The Mmatterialisation Chamber to meet me and Skit, and a very polite and fascinating gentleman he was too, very interested in hearing our machines, to boot. Of course, most of the things in here that make noise are musical instruments, which rather defied the concept of the album, so we looked to what else was in the room. The rumble you hear at the beginning is sampled from an old broken dehumidifier, it made a cool noise so I hung on to it until I could use it for something! The backing sound with the doppler effect is the dialling tone from that old white office phone you can see in the photo above, that's actually the first phone I ever had, must be 40 years old now. Bell doesn't work anymore, but at least that means nobody can disturb me while I'm working! The noisy phrases of the piece use an HP Office Jet printer (had that a good few years too) and a paper shredder. Actually, we'd already recorded the printer for a track for Vladmir Vpdodo's Shorty Music series earlier in the summer, it's called “Dodgy Printshop” and appears on “Hashtag (Part V)”.

0

Which just left us to record our visitor's interdimensional craft taking off from the field (a recording which we then used backwards for the landing sequence as we missed it first time) and watch it fly off to the skies of the west, heading for the Irish Sea and the sounds of our wonderful coastal winds. Then Twizz comes running in...

“Where's the candy?” she asks, our visitor had promised her a packet of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups for turning off Lankybox after all.
“Oh, sorry, darling,” says Sam, “he must have forgotten to leave it.”

“Bugger!” says Twizz.

And that's how we spent our September... enjoy muchly!

BACK TO ALBUM PAGE