Then the shaman took us

And so, to techno…….or rather Oh! No!……….yes……..the weird headspace of Batshit Fruitcake!

Anything goes. Samplers. Sequencing. Remixing. Nothing is sacred.
Ekliptikon [1998] was a celebration of the total eclipse in the UK, not seen since 1927, I believe. This track is full-on, 9 minutes of frenetic energy. It has a strange anecdote. Batshit took a voice sample from a Time & Space CD (CDs then, not downloads). It was a typist talking. He chucked it into Cubase and reversed it without even listening. When we were mixing more carefully we auditioned the sample again. The voice appeared to give the exact date of the eclipse in 1927! Spooky!

Apparently, Hard On Monika [1998] by his mates Old Time Dancing is about Clinton. No comment.

Leper Seed [1998] the remix, that is, was a collaboration with Eskallonia Kwiksilva. They ransacked some old Matchstick Canons material and came up with this. It’s a Yamaha sampler driven by Cubase. Kwiksilva tried to convince us he was giving it to Peter Gabriel. The hoax lasted for a week. Hope it was.

Ekliptikon
Batshit & Fruitcake
Hard On Monika
Old Time Dancing
Leper Seed (Petromix)
Eskallonia Kwiksilva

Kwiksilva could certainly knock them out. He did Zeus [1998] in two days on a Mac. Just playing, he said.

Dream Of The Screaming Pools ( or Scream of the Dreaming Pools) [1998] had a much longer gestation. He spent a lot of time fiddling with samples, effects and odd programs. Propeller Heads was all the rage. Then he gave it to The Robe to remix. Still it did turn out to be quite ‘dreamy’ or screamy. Definitely should have done soundtracks. Don’t know how it went from them to the Beano Readers.

Zeus
Eskallonia Kwiksilva
Dream of the Screaming Pools
The Robe

An interesting period. Technology was changing rapidly. No sooner than you updated your Mac, software & kit then it was out of date! This still happens.

I’m out of that. Still have OS 8.05 on my G3 Mac! It works fine, alongside the 2Gb audio partition. Haha! *

The actual track, ‘then the shamen took us,’ evolved into a semi-experimental instrumental. It’s an odd tempo-shifting long electro-psych thing, infused with delayed guitars! One for the Amazon, perhaps. Never got beyond the demo stage.

  • Admission. Much of this site is edited on an Air, with enormous specs compared with a G3. Also have a MOTU 828.