And So It Was

Running Time: 0:42

Released On: "42 Seconds #7" - Various Artists (190 tracks)

Label: Owlripper Recordings

Release Date: 30th December 2024

Format: Download

Buy Link: Bandcamp

I don't know quite what to say about this one, it seems almost like taking the piss in the name of art (again), but there was actually a point to the project. And So It Was, so what it is; it's actually "god Eat god", the very first track Skit and meself recorded, way back in October 2019, simply sped up to exactly 42 seconds. Why would we do that? Okay, when you are sitting comfortably, I shall begin...

Although I'd already been around for half a century when I first met my birth mother, her death in the summer of 2023 hit me much harder than I had at first realised. I created Requiem Maternus  for the ninth volume of {AN} Eel's Two Halves compilation series, not long after we'd got back from London for the funeral, utilising stems that El Zombie Espacial had previously sent me for the collaborative project. It probably wasn't what he expected me to do with them, but how can you ever see things like this coming, and he was very understanding about it, bless him. As for the track, the cathartic effect I had hoped for was not forthcoming. I'd always known I was going to die one day, never been comfortable with the idea, but the knowledge was there. However, now both my birth parents had gone, I had the genetic indicator, father 79, mother 80. That was going to be a nervy year. What followed, and still does to quite some extent, was something of a creative drought. It's like I can see what I want to do through heavily obscured glass, but can't quite bring it to focus, and the effort required to smash the glass seemed almost overwhelming. Although a track called Пятьсот (Pytsot, it's Russian for 500) was released the same month, it wasn't new, but was one that had been sitting around for two years whilst Alexey Kondart finished gathering material for his epic International Experimental Music Compilation (500 Way Split) compilation. Then there was the aforementioned Taking The Piss In The Name Of Art for International Strange Music Day in the August, though that kind of did what it said on the tin and little more. And the Bug Metallic album in October was a Conny Plankton project using our stems and samples, not one of our own. It was actually five months before we did anything new, The Twelve Days Of Christmas, and I had to push myself to get that done because I felt I owed Default Standard one for the endless procrastination over the Melophobia collaboration. And, if I'm honest, I'm not exactly Mr. Christmas!

It was only supposed to be a 'five year mission' leading up to The Gravitas Project, but 2024 has been a very tough year for our family on a personal level. It's nothing I can publicly go into, for which I can only apologise, but I can say we're "exhausted but quietly optimistic", yeah, I can say that. So anyway, it had already been a year of little more than reissues and collections when Paul Priest started putting out the call for contributions to this seventh volume of his 42 Seconds series; we'd only produced three new tracks all year, and as I said on the previous page, one of those was only 50 milliseconds long. I was starting to feel like I was letting people down. Specifically, the people who run the very netlabels that are pretty much the only viable purpose to being an independent music producer these days. And they are the last people we ever want to let down as their support is quite invaluable. So this is it, And So It Was, not meant to be a cheap cheat or sneaky reissue, rather a nod backwards to the beginning of the Magic Bullet, and a hope it will signal it all to begin again. In the meantime, it's almost certainly a piece of full circle closure on compilation tracks. We're definitely not ready to wrap things up quite yet, the Bullet still has three outstanding projects to finish first, and we fully intend to get them ALL completed in the coming months...

THE THREE UNFINISHED PROJECTS

• No. 1: The Melophobia split we agreed to do for Default Standard Records about three years ago now. Mr. Cosmos sent us a great half hour piece of electro-experimentalism called Michael & Marilyn circa April 2022, we still haven't finished our half yet, though most of it is written and there are rough mixes for about a third of it. Wish us luck, this one's in the works currently...

• No. 2: Mi Casa, Su Casa. We've been wanting to leave this for posterity as a complete album in its own right for a while now. It was originally one of the 2020 Electronic Cottage Splits series in which we were teamed with cassette culture legend Bryan Baker's dabodab project, our half running just under the 30 minute mark. We've done a couple more tracks for it since; Hackensall Road and We Will Contemplate The Passage Of Time, both of which have been released on compilations in the meantime. Owen Knight will return for his role as The Traveller, in fact he's already recorded all his parts for it, which is pretty much what we still have to do for ourselves! This one's up next...

• No. 3: Officer Kitty. Born from Shaun Robert's idea of Musique Concrète For Children as a volume in his Institute For Alien Research compilation series, for which we fused our Twizz's then 7 year old adventure stories with our sense of the avant garde, this project soon took on a life of its own. The original Adventures Of Officer Kitty In Space was followed by Attack Of The Killer Beanie Boos, The God Of Love and The Donut, plus a session on Neil Crud's Punk & Beyond show on Louder Than War Radio. Could we really deny it a legacy? Eight out of ten cats say their owners don't get it...

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