Grab this album on cassette and download from our Bandcamp page.
Side A
1. Timewarp Exhalation
2. 98 Demo Intro Updated
3. Plastic And Glass
4. Sunhat And The Clap
5. Son Of A Systems Engineer Manager (Micro-Song)
6. Send Me Away, More Deserving
7. Universal Scope
8. Climate Teastrained
9. Going Dutch (Perverted Groove) 7″ Edit
10. Bassage 1
11. Misguided
12. Who Is That Cthulhu Cat
13. Kiss And Tell (Micro-Song)
Side B
1. I Almost Died 2012
2. Shelved (Output Noise Mix)
3. The Fens
4. The Fens Jig
5. The Guest 2002
6. They Know Nothing (Cheap Punk) 1″ Edit
7. Never Eject
8. Say No!*
9. White Darth Vaydar
10. The Kesh Jig**
Written, played and recorded by:
Andy Brain Vocals, guitars, bass, synths, melodica, percussion, programming
Bob Follen Vocals, drums, piano, synths, percussion, guitars
Luke Sample Vocals, guitars, synths, flute, harmonica, percussion
Caroline Vile Vocals, recorder, clarinet, percussion
* = b8 written by Dick van der Harst and Elvis Peeters, recorded for Brussels art exhibition
** = b10 trad., arr. Keshco
With:
Luke Aldington (a3, bass), Inés Boente (a9, synth; a13, guitar, percussion), Gareth Monger (a3, synth)
British collective Keshco return with the 62-minute “Never Eject”, mixing wilfully lo-fi home-recorded and live cuts with re-edited old favourites. The first run is 50 copies on tape, presented in a flat double-pack together with exclusive individual cassette-shaped artwork made by band member Bob under his guise of Bob Art Models.
Andy: We’ve contributed to previous Cassette Store Days (e.g. 2015′s “Freaks At A Wake”) and this year decided to make something that reflects the mixtape culture we grew up with. There are songs and sounds going back to our early days, plus a bulk of new tracks. We’ve also tackled traditional number The Kesh Jig, from our namesake town in Ireland.
Andy, talk us through Side A?:
Side A starts with a collage snipped from our first label demo in 1998, updated with extra spurts and squawks. The sinister goth-pop of “Plastic And Glass” dates from 2000 and I’ve taken a jam recording of the band at that time, looping the instrumental sections. The cut-and-shut method adds to the queasy, dislocated feel. The lyrics have been mostly rewritten; it’s a song where the narrative only became clear in retrospect. It makes more sense now in an online world of webcams, findoms and addiction.
“Sunhat And The Clap” features lyrics written using Oulipo methods, in this case an n+7 generator which replaces all the nouns in a given text with those seven down in the dictionary. Playing around with the n+ number gave me a few outputs and I’ve enhanced the results to bring out the underlying filth. The original text? John Clare’s “Summer”. The clapping percussion is loosely based around Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music”.
There’s a 15 second version of Luke’s mournful “Son of a Systems Engineer Manager” created for the Free Music Archive’s micro-song challenge, then a collage of some pieces by Bob, mainly the vocal delay experiment “Send Me Away”, which brings to mind the sounds and feeling of an ultimately futile train journey.
Next we have a 9 minute raucous live cut, “Universal Scope”, taken from a noisy outdoors performance in 2013. It’s prefaced by a riff-tastic section we usually play as the end to live stalwart “Halloween”.
There’s a brief loop taken from our synthpop classic “Climate Dance”, then a 7″ edit of “Going Dutch”, a sinister, intense wig-out originally from the first volume of our “Filmmaker’s Reference Kit”.
Piano psychedelia “Misguided” is Bob’s pointed answer to those who believe the rock myth about all the greats being reliant on drugs for creativity.
Following this we have a track of my vocal beatboxing, “Who Is That Cthulhu Cat?”; then another edited micro-tune, “Kiss And Tell”.
Andy, talk us through Side B?:
“I Almost Died”, originally from 2009′s “Deforestation Of Dak”, is a live favourite and here we catch a version of that, with Bob on ominous keyboards and me on acoustic guitar and voice through a snarling and screeching Dynamike robot microphone.
“Shelved” was a slab of latent bitterness on our 2011 EP “Futile Peace Offering” and here I’ve put the whole track through an extreme noise reduction filter based on the drum track, then exported the noise output so what you’re hearing is only the frequencies that are prominent in the drums.
Luke’s angry grungy guitar on “The Fens” backed with deep bass and stabs of synthesized white noise makes perhaps one of the hardest sounds we’ve ever put out. This is then subverted in “The Fens Jig”, which features Caroline on a saucy madrigal-style recorder, plus riding crop percussion and a purring drone played by gripping a magic wand.
“The Guest” is very much turn-of-the-century folkie Keshco, originally released on 2000′s “The Seeds of Wom”. This is a slightly later retake.
Title track “Never Eject” was the last to be written and recorded. For this I’ve married a riff of Luke’s (captured in the “Bassage 1″ fragment on Side A) to another drum track recorded in Bob’s shed last year, and written a new tune that feels a rallying cry for the Keshco outlook. The refrain “for the sake of clarity” is a nod to the single by late 90s pronk band Schulte/Eriksson who were a major influence on our cut-up style around the millennium.
“Say No!” is a peace song based around an original score by veteran composers Elvis Peeters and Dick van der Harst. We submitted this version alongside 30 other choirs and groups for an international art exhibition which had a residency in Brussels before going on the road around Europe. It was originally subtitled “The Deserter’s Song”.
“White Darth Vaydar” is Bob’s original high-energy synthpop version of what surfaced on 2010′s “Accountants By Day” in rewritten acoustic form as “Abysinnia Next Week”. Enjoy the compulsive riff and obscure absurdist references to life growing up in 1980s East Anglia.
We finish with our first rendition of old traditional number “The Kesh Jig”, with Luke and Caroline duetting on flute and recorder, played to our own chord pattern.
Trackbacks & Pingbacks