1.
monsters on my lawn (40.14)
|
You
can see the full front cover of this here,
and the back here.
You should see them cos they're cool and you might
be able to see what it is. Credit to Tina
Toth again, of course. Oh, I love her.
This is quite interesting, if you think 40-minute songs
can be interesting. I do, because I read The Wire and
am a pretentious fuck. Ha!
So, the plan for this was to do something i've wanted
to do for a long time: improvisation. Hit 'record'
and play something, anything, and stop when I feel
like it, and see what's happened. Spontaneity. Sort
of like a jam session but with one person. Anyway,
after a while doing that, I had a few things, but not
too much worth hearing. I also had this feeling that
if I tried to record for 45 minutes straight, something
would fuck up and I'd lose everything. This happens
a lot to me with short tracks (phone rings, need a
piss, drop a plectrum, haven't actually hit 'record',
sound inexplicably cuts out etc etc), so I kind of
relaxed the rules, which gave me the opportunity to
add complementary melodies and stuff. Consider this
partially improvised, then. A lot of parts were done
in one take, and I left in things which hissed or cracked,
and I left in wrong notes. It was recorded in bits
between June and August 2004. July was spent romancin'.
The idea was to be kind of like The Necks, an Australian
jazz trio who play improvised 60-minute pieces which
change subtly in the repetition. They're fucking great.
This, on the other hand, is all over the place. With
my other stuff there's kind of a restriction on putting
certain things in, because when you're trying to make
a coherent album there's no time for spending 7 minutes
locked in an atonal drone or going ambient for a bit,
you gotta head for the next hook. This CD was made
with the assumption that no-one would be interested
in listening to it, and so there was more freedom.
Hence this begins with nearly seven minutes of slightly
unsettling, droning guitar, the sound that happens
when you play six open strings with a computer mouse.
You can hear that below, because I know how much you
kids love a good drone.
So, there's a lot in here. 'casey'
off 'unrarities' grew out
of this, so that's in there, and then there's a bit
of 'since
last year' played in a different key. Aside from
that, there's more mouseplay, some beer bottle fun,
a bit of low feedback which becomes a kind of ambient
thing, various longform guitar 'motifs' (haha I always
wanted to use that word), and a bit that sounds like
a lullaby. There's a couple of human voices (Ghostbusters,
X-Files and Johnny Cochran, I think, though I discovered
them using random methods and only found out who they
were after I'd used them). So, there's a bit here for
everyone. I was gonna put the whole 38mb mp3 here,
but you don't really care, do you? No, exactly. So,
if anyone wants to hear this in full, pop an email
in my inbox at jon@enoughrope.net
or catch me on MSN or Cactus
or whatever, and I'll send you a beautiful CD for free
in the post, and I'll throw in a more tuneful one as
well. And maybe a lollipop. For free! I know you won't.
This is gonna be the least-promoted of all enough rope
CDs, partly because of the scary content and partly
because enough rope isn't very popular. The last CD
in particular, when I was pimping it I felt like I
was one of those guys wandering round Market Street
pushing 'Jews For Jesus' leaflets into the hands of
an uninterested public, for them to throw it in the
bin without looking. It got to me because I felt like
it was the best thing I'd done, but...perhaps I make
too much music and I think people have reached critical
mass on enough rope mp3s. I can almost hear people
saying 'no more! please! we shall humour you no longer!'.
So, yeah, fuckers. Sorry, that's harsh. I never download
anyone else's stuff either. Fucking internet musicians,
man, who do they think they are? Trying to steal precious
minutes of our lives which we could have invested listening
to, I dunno, who's popular? Razorlight?
The next CD will have 12 tracks and it'll sound like
The Libertines, then. You'll all fucking listen. I
might even start doing crack and stealing.
Oh, yeah, the title. I'm trying to stop using one-word
album titles. This came out of me trying to use the
word 'monsters' in a song title, cos it's a fucking
great word. Say it. 'Monsters'. It's also a reference
to De La Soul's 'Potholes In My Lawn' and Antipop Consortium's
'Ghostlawns'. I don't care whether you believe that
or not, those are two cool reference, you fucksticks.
Sorry, I really should stop abusing the public in these
rants. I love you all really. |
© Enough
Rope