:-) Glad you liked it, Jess! I was hoping you would. :-)
I'll dig up the info on the release and label when I go home tonight -- I think the label was Quatermass, but I'm not positive. As I understand it from the promo guff that came with the album, it's from some fellow who used to live in Norwich and is now somewhere else in the UK. Used to be in some Godflesh-style band, started futzing around with computers, now works with sampling and all that. Apparently he feeds all his samples onto cassette and then works with that for That There Warmer Sound, and I think it shows. Daft Punk was definitely the first thing that came to mind when I heard it, but that's a good call on Mouse on Mars.
David Day to thread! He's the one who scored me the copy of this to start with. ;-) Also, he can confirm -- Vacuous Ninnies or Vacuous Ninny? I saw it both ways but the album titles is the first.
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 5 June 2003 16:54 (twenty-two years ago)
And yes, there's a PDF press release on the guy -- same one I read before, and the fact that he mentions being a huge Mouse on Mars fan shows Jess's ears are sharp indeed. :-) Here's the skinny:
Vacuous Ninny is based somewhere in the North of England. He has been living there for a year now, having returned from seven years in the scenic cultural backwater of Norwich, where he worked as a Graphic Designer.
He produced a short film called CAREER OPPORTUNITIES FOR BIOMECHANICAL CYBORGS, an absurd vision of a dystopian future where the machines have stolen all the jobs, which has been shown in a number of animation festivals.
He?s been making electronic music since 1997, when he blew his grant and savings on a small studio. Before that, he used to play drums in a band called SOURMOUTH doing GODFLESH and PITCH SHIFTER covers!
His method of working is to sit down (very important!) and grab a handful of cassette tapes picked at random from a box containing hundreds. "The tapes can include anything from AUTECHRE, TORTOISE and MOUSE ON MARS to NAPALM DEATH,
STOCKHAUSEN and MADONNA. It really doesn't matter. I then play these tapes on a beaten old ghetto blaster with a knackered EQ. It's completely fucked but gives everything a wonderfully warm and compressed sound. I find a clean digital sample makes the music a little too cold. The signal is then fed through a KORG KAOSS PAD to completely mash things up. I might flick across to the radio, too, to cram as much information into a sample as possible. The more that you have going on in a sample, the less control you have over it. As a result, the end product - 'the music' - is far more unpredictable."
Some brief descriptions of some of the tracks on the CD
CRIPPLES FALL DOWN and (CAN'T) GET UP were made shortly after plundering my girlfriend's extensive 80s record collection. As a result, I was miraculously cured of my rabid aversion to the music of that decade (FIVE STAR, MADONNA, IRENE CARA,
WHAM!, etc.). This is, I think, a taste of things to come.
THE HOTTENTOT VENUS was an African woman from the early 19th century whose infamously large vagina was pickled in a jar and displayed in France for several decades. It was recently returned to Africa as it is considered a national treasure! The Hottentot's were (are?) an African tribe whose women had notoriously fat arses. Of course, this has no bearing on the track but when you come across a name like that you can't help but use it.
NAPKIN RHESUS That killer bass line is actually a [CENSORED] sample. No one would ever guess! It?s a snippet of a typically onanistic guitar solo that's been chopped up and pitched down an octave or two.
THIS SCHTICK This was cobbled together in the space of a day. The main samples were made from snippets of a BBC RADIO 3 jazz concert that happened to be on when I was sampling a tape of the previous night's GILLES PETERSON show. the beats were sampled from an old cassette containing 808 beats generated using REBIRTH.
My favourite tracks are THE ANSWERS SMILE and DENKEN DUNKEN although I do want to go in a different direction with my next release. So expect to hear more stuff like (CAN'T) GET UP in future. However, it doesn?t matter what I intend to make, the end
result always confounds my expectations.
INFLUENCES
"The best albums I bought in the last couple of years were LUOMO's VOCALCITY and OVAL's PROCESS. I am a big MOUSE ON MARS fan and have been heavily influenced lately by MATTHEW HERBERT and the KOMPAKT label.? He is also a sucker for a lot of 80s music (THE GAP BAND, THE FAT BACK BAND, KOOL AND THE GANG, THE WHISPERS, NU SHOOZ, FIVE STAR, etc.). Such cloying syrupiness is counterbalanced by an unhealthy fondness for bands like CARCASS, ENTOMBED, EXODUS, NEUROSIS and DEATH ANGEL. Thankfully, this secret passion has not managed to influence his music just yet. Other influences include EDWARD GOREY, CHRIS WARE (The Acme
Novelty Library), THE RESIDENTS, NEGATIVLAND, JOHN OSWALD, BOREDOMS, SLINT, NURSE WITH WOUND, WOLFGANG VOIGT, ATOM HEART, AUTECHRE, BILL HICKS, MICHAEL MOORE, NOAM CHOMSKY, ALAN MOORE, CHRIS MORRIS, WHORE CULL, etc.
Frankly, this guy would fit in perfectly here, I'm guessing.
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 6 June 2003 00:09 (twenty-two years ago)
one year passes...