Shriekback

[korova1]

Here is a little info on the latest Shriekback installment from their website. Considering the last thing they did "Having a Moment" was pretty good, I decided to put this up! Just the fact that Barry and Andy Partridge (and Wendy) are working together on a couple songs will probably make me buy it... The words are from Barry Andrews:

Shriek Album Update

Shrieks errr 10th proper album (hold on -1 tench, 2 Care, 3 Jam Science, 4 O&G, 5 BNM, 6 goBang, 7 S.City, 8 Naked Apes & Pond Life, 9 Having a Moment) by proper I guess I mean one that pushes the Big Project forward which is ...let me see - attempting to mutate the brute matter of life into intelligibility (Christ - get a proper job). So here it comes - the next instalment. and this one is i guess a bit bleak. Fun though - in a Shriekback kind of a way.

Shriekback's 10th album is to be called 'CORMORANT' - yes, the bird and yes I do know why but we dont need to get into that quite yet. It's songs contain a lot of death (Mart and I both lost our Dads over the last couple of years: losing parents, I now realise, means that you get to move to the front of the Waiting List - 'our lot' (our contemporaries, our celebrities, the people who know the same kids' programmes I do) are next in line for You Know What. It's a Thing. There's also more than a little mid-life crisis in the mix (sorry but there it is).

Musically it's considerably more 'detailed' than anything I've done I would say: the long nights and days on the laptop encourage crafting, tweaking and experiment (there's usually no-one there to tell you to stop apart from anything else). The sound is rich, dense and complicated. Subtle, I think. It's definitely coming from the landscape of Big Night Music and Sacred City rather than any of the others.

Here's the list of titles thus far:

RONNY (a groundbreaker, I reckon: using the image of an old criminal in exile - glorious and squalid - to look at manhood, that curious state where recklessness and loneliness always seem to hover over all the things we create. Mart plays more kinds of percussion than I insist actually exist and Mark both strums and bows mandolins). The end has a sentimental twist that still makes me smirk. Oh and Wendy Partridge (recorded in her kitchen in Bristol) plays a blinder - those lush sweet womens' voices that all old reprobates need.

SEA THEORY: built around a treated percussion loop and with actual marine sound effects - yes real shingle and seagulls! It's a portrait of the modern beach in all it's tawdriness. And the Theory? Well, like the Bible, you can use it to prove anything.

REASON WITH THE BEAST: short sharp meditation on that time honoured Shriekback theme - managing ones baser impulses. Featuring as do quite a few of the others - gasp - Andy Partridge (he volunteered over one of our infrequent Swindon curry fests and glad I was to have him onboard). We recorded all his bits in an afternoon in his shed on my laptop and, since the last time we played together was ohhh the late Bronze Age, it was remarkable how empathic it all was. On reflection though maybe we're both just emotionally stunted and have failed to grow or develop in any way apart from an increase in nasal hair.

HUYTFI, TRUE PASSAGE, THUMBLESS: all instrumental and very enjoyable to do. I see them as bulletins from some puppet theatre of my mind.

WATERBABY: - a fairly old song (some may recall it from my one man show in the States in 03) finally committed to hard-disk (if that's not a contradiction in terms). A baleful elegy on fear and disappointment (am I turning you on?). Lovely bvs again from Wendy Woo. All crystalline and precarious.

VOILED KARLETUS: yes you heard. A sort of supercalifragilistic.. type of a thing. Featuring the amazing Carlo who came down on the train to Swindon with a bottle of whisky and some CDs of wild eclecticism; sang and drank all day and a lot of the night then charmed my Mum and my Aunt over sunday lunch who never for a moment suspected what a really very strange Italian they had welcomed into their house (sample improv lyric: 'I make women pregnant. Yeah! I plant my seed in there..').

TROUBLEMEAT: old skool groovy shouty Shrieks with hooligan drums by Mart (recorded - as with drums on all the other tunes - in an afternoon in a 'proper' studio in London (with an...engineer and everything. Mmm engineers..). Andy Partridge giving it some welly and Swindon lass Natasha Griffifths belting out the bvs with gusto.

(BTW I'm doing a gig (playing piano) with her and her dad -old mate Paul Griffifths at the Beehive in Swindon on August 2nd - do come on down..)

THE STRONGEST WIND THAT BLOWS: already had a release