It Was Friday Evening

Running Time: 4:33

Released On: "Flexi Disc Super Special" - Various Artists (15 tracks)

Label: Institute For Alien Research

Release Date: 12th February 2020

Format: Download

Buy Link: Bandcamp - Name Your Price

Again on vinyl records, the brief for this project, as with Ostracism On Principal Thoroughfare, came back to flexi discs, though this time with the accent on the spoken word, of which Skit and I had no examples whatsoever. Good start, we thought. However, we were keen to take up every musique concrète invitation we got at the time, and as luck would have it, the internet is a wonderful source of the obscure. Plus, we'd also put together what, in my humble opinion, is one of our best ever pieces of artwork to accompany whatever we came up with (though we later changed it to the above more relevant one), so there was no way we were missing out! All we had to do was look for another of those strange and pointless "watch me putting a flexi disc on my record player and pressing play" videos on You Tube. Yup, there were one or two. The one that particularly caught our interest was a rather cheesily acted and narrated American Easter story disc. We'd never seen one like that over here, I dare say they do exist, but England doesn't really have a 'Bible belt' as such, we just have Cliff Richard instead.

"It was Friday evening," the tale begins flatly, they really should have got Rod Serling, "Jesus had just died on the cross."

"Grim start." Skit muttered.

"Spoilers," I replied, "it's a happy ending, he'll be back after the weekend."

Starting with the speech quiet enough to force the listener's attention, we set out to build a soundscape with the natural background noise of the stylus on the flexi, then began to raise the volume gradually throughout. The more you hear the message, the louder it gets / the more annoying it gets (*delete as applicable). Look, religious beliefs are very much  a personal choice, it's not for us to tell anyone what to think, but that goes both ways, okay? This is a piece of musique concrète, it is what it is, that's all it is. Nuff said. There were also some other bits of the dialogue that appealed to us, not least being some perfect apple-pie child saying "He was so wonderful." To be fair, I'm sure we'll say the same about Cliff after he's gone, and he had more hit records...

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