Then the shaman took us

And so, to techno…….or heck, 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. 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] is about Clinton. No comment.

Leper Seed [1998] was a collaboration with Eskallonia Kwiksilva. They ransacked some old Snow White Likes Curry 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. Reckon he just thought he was for a week. Loopy?

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. Still it did turn out to be quite ‘dreamy.’ Definitely should have done soundtracks.

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 No sooner than you updated your Mac, software & kit then it was out of date!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 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.