Track listening and links to 192kpbs mp3s:

1. First Day Of School

2. Down Dirty: Mindfuck Remix

3. Automatic Response

4. Nice One, Dude.

5. The Burden Of Modern Architecture

6. Dj Kool

7. Enter The Code

8. Quiet Revolution (three movements)

- I. The Ingenious Strike

- II. Constructivism: Psychic Author Recall

- III. Embers Or Sanity's End

9. Track 6: Man Gets On Bus

10. My Pet Human

11. Public Sponsorship Delirium - Synaesthesia

12. Opera

13. Cup Of Tea?

This is a "re-release" of an old album I did on Fast Tracker II in late 2000. It generally won't be for everyone, but if you're up for some rather experimental, absurdist, lofi, noise, dark and bizarre electronica then this is for you. The above files are not remastered, so this is as you would have heard it on CD years ago. I am not fussing over promoting this album everywhere, but it is good to have it available for completion's sake. Previously there were only only a handful of CD copies of this album floating about. Also included is the full digital artwork set which I did back at the same time for a very early version of this website.

What to say about re-releasing this old monster? It's been boggling my mind lately and I've been putting off the re-release as a result. It's hard to get in the head of the yourself of long ago when you were practically a different person. *Takes a deep breath* Let's look at the context first:

Back in the year 2000 I was in the second year of my studies at UNE and living at Mary White College. College culture in Armidale is particularly well known for it's drinking of alchol and student partying at both the lodgings and the then-active UNE Bistro. A combination of a few following pressures and circumstances meant that I was getting rather caught up in the darker end of the spectrum with this activity: I really wasn't enjoying my study channelling me to be a school teacher; I had hyper-critical self image problems that led to destructive behaviour; I had a brief intense relationship with a girl that had its fair share of unhealthy drama; and to top it all off I was mid-way through some intense mind-altering relationships with a few friends looking in their own ways to break out of the conformity box in both healthy and unhealthy ways. Naturally, a fair amount of booze and irregular sleep patterns lubricated this whole experience. All this equated to a lot of dark questioning energy that fed back into the music in acts somewhere between catharsis and self mutilation. Musical choices were done out of demented passion rather than being guided from accessible structure. What you hear is FT2 trying its best survive me destroying music as I knew it, composing as fast as possible.

At the time I though about what was happing with the music and the absurdity of it all: the album shaped up to be a sort of manifesto for "rude music". A little bit like a spoilt brat defying expectations, twisting where you least expect and want him to go. Appropriately, all of these ideas of "rude music" spilt over into the Malnoia Project with Martin Kidd, more on that another time.

At any point I wasn't even deliberately trying to set out to 'make an album', having successfully completed that task earlier that year with Puddles. What I remember is that at some point I noticed that my song folders were full of these works that fitted together under the themes aforementioned. Once I realised I wasn't far from a finished body of work I think I belted out three songs in a day ("Burden", "Public" and "Cup"), and later threw it all together as a CD putting the aggressively absurd title on it "Pornography and Other Corporate Nonseses". In those moments of white-heat creativity I had no foresight into how future web-search-bots would bring me unwanted attention due to the porn part of the title and filenames - this was never intended! You only have to look at the sheep on the album cover to realise this is about something else and in particular was inspired by early encounters with the University's system of bureaucracy and endless witnessable sleaze underneath it all looming in the college's residential system. I was fascinated with the incorporated opposite poles of that situation, just as much as I was interested in bending sound so much to question whether it was a 'song' any more. It all seem fairly evident back then, and you can be forgiven for not understanding any of it as much I struggle to do right now (and get a little laugh out of too). I'm glad it is finally out there! Let the world decided just what colour of mad it is instead of it festering away collecting dust somewhere.

What follows is some commentary of each song on the album:

1. First Day Of School - This is easily my favourite track from the whole album and it has a classic sadness to it as well as textured lofi industrialism. The long bass drones are a detuned sample from my DX9 that mostly cycle through a 1st - 6th minor set probably influenced by Aphex Twin's "At The Heart of It All". The clumsy sounding noise in the background that later builds at the end of the song is a combo of some distroted low reverberation and a 'distortion conversion' (a cool feature in FT2's sample editor called 'Convert' turning the sound inside out) of a standard funky guitar riff I did. A piano sample also got 'converted' and ended up being the improvised melody line echoing off. One part in this song I'm still proud of is the minimalist industrial percussion with a simple echo off to the right to give the song a sense of acoustic spatiality like some abandoned factory. The massive noise build at the end of the song that cuts served as a template outro that I must have repeated in other songs 4 or 5 times since (I've no idea why it just sounds cool). The build stops revealing a mangled voice sample of me saying "Today is a fine day to play god". This echoes the phrases I repeat earlier in the song "So hungry...", which I guess builds the doomy scene of an abstracted 'first day of school' - ready to face the melancholia of institutional conformity with a patient will to enact chaos 'from the inside'.

2. Down Dirty: Mindfuck Remix - I remember recording the looped screaming in my little room at college later to find that the other students in my block heard me and wondered if it was alright! Most of the other sounds in the song are made of from samples from another tracker artist at the time named Marc Crouch - he had put up his song on United Trackers called "Down Dirty" for remix. Seeing that this was a fairly boring loungy club dance song I decided to 'really fuck it up' and really bring out the predatory sleaze element. The vocal line "You gave me something I've been waiting for" is actually Marc stretched out and repeated, while noise and drones happily lay waste to the sonic landscape. Needlessly to say Marc and the audience at the time on UT found my version disturbing, so mission accomplished.

3. Automatic Response - This song is where I really started to get into that "rude music" idea and defy my own expectations of what a song should be. The song mood is acidic and full of negative tension - I guess that's pretty obvious when I'm repeating "don't" and "just you fucking don't" throughout. The word "don't" became a bit of a catch-phrase at the time with its empowering negative assertion. To throw it into a song was just a simple natural step. All the music completely screams that assertion, moving startlingly between