Down to the Silver Sea (GASP!01LP) 2013
After a prolonged period of wandering off, the sun this year has never been more actively malevolent. Seventeen notable cities have evaporated, and numerous picnics have been slightly postponed due to an overwhelming demand for decorative parasols. Simply the perfect time for Gecophonic to release Down to the Silver Sea.
GASP!01LP almost certainly has the potential to accompany all of your extensive Summertime activities.
Whether flower-pressing in the garden, hallucinating in the summerhouse, fainting inside stifling sites of historical interest, pirouetting along the promenade, or even sea-cruise thalassophobia complications, barely a moment will pass that isn't made all the sweeter by obsessively listening to Down to the Silver Sea.
Naturally, Gecophonic favourites, the Moon Wiring Club, feature on this Summer Special LP, providing enchanting melodies and foot-flapping rhythms that ensure a familiarity of confusion to sooth the fervid attentions of their kindly listeners. Joining them are a magical gaggle of talented musicians, each flourishing a trio of delightful compositions that thematically compliment each other in a varied seasonal bouquet of charming sound!
Let us find out a little more about these exciting new players and the kinds of flavours they bring to the table...
Time Attendant is the musical pseudonym of noted London painter-about-town, Paul Snowdon. Although an expatriate of Easingwold, Paul has become a noted feature of the Capital's landscape, and can often be found chugging along the Thames on his haunted houseboat The Grotter, regaling tourists with salty tales of his adventures upon the high seas through a stolen police megaphone.
Parliamentary proceedings are traditionally halted whenever the dilapidated Grotter drifts past, and to grasp a snatch of his gassy vowels straining through a thick pea-souper is believed to bring great luck. Snowdon also occasionally turns up in Covent Garden offering disturbing charcoal sketches of lapsed celebrities for an unrealistic price.
After 26 years of providing the voice for Snooper Dodds the immensely popular antiquarian sneak-thief from children's Television show Liza Larceny, Sarah Angliss retired to the mostly fictional seaside resort of Brighton to overrun a miniature Vaudeville guest-house The Gaslight & Greasepaint. A pertinent fixture of the seafront, Sarah spends most of her days coaxing tourists to perform in her underwater theatre The Rusty Aqualung while she accompanies them on a variety of home-made instruments, such as the 36 tonne Underwater Bagpipes that partially destroyed Hastings in 1984.
She is a renowned composer for stage and screen, and recently the National Theatre's successful 6 minute run of Oh Yes, Sir! Oh No, Sir! was delightfully scored only using sounds extracted from a gastric hound. Angliss is accompanied at all times by her animatronic husband and gangland agent Tony 'Sawdust' Ludo, and must not be approached under any circumstances.
Whilst displaying music of a highly varied pallet, Knö, Jon Brooks, and The Original Uptown Sycophants are all in fact nom-de-plumes for an internationally mysterious syndicate of composers known only as The International Mysterious Syndicate of Composers (TIMSOC). Operating from a hi-tech lair located somewhere inside the fabled Peak District Catacombs, it is estimated that TIMSOC have covertly provided over 45% of all music listened to in the UK for the past 33 years, and it has recently been discovered that billion-selling 80s Europop sensation Swanky was entirely a TIMSOC papier-mâché construct.
Rumours persist that for the past decade, the popular 10,000 Records of the Year feature from experimental music magazine Acoustic Dalliance, has been made up entirely by TIMSOC composing under a bewildering variety of kaleidoscopic guises. Such fanciful conjecture only adds to the delightful perfume of mystery that surrounds the sophisticated sounds of TIMSOC.
Howling Moss is the latest musical wheeze from an unorthodox individual known as Our Head Technician, who has reached a dazzling level of Continental fame and notoriety through his exceptional Parisian eatery Pâté de Porc en Croûte au Coin. When not serving up a mouth-watering pastry, this idiosyncratic operative likes nothing better than to inch slowly through the countryside of Southern England in a bizarrely antiquated van, pausing only to surreptitiously freeze selected buildings, monuments and animals with a curious cryogenic device of his own sinister manufacture.
Why OHT has chosen to plough the lucrative proceeds of pie into this uneasy venture is a complete mystery. Famously, when interviewed by Italian Vogue in an article tantalisingly entitled The Kentish Iceman, his sole response to humorous questions about life and art, was that
‘only absolute Zero offers absolute perfection'.
Although the demands of these twin passions are time consuming, this month OHT has successfully released music for a variety of interesting and fashionable record labels, including Bagshoes, Pearson's Perfects, Snazzbox, Chump-runner, Buff Waistcoat, Distant Crunch, So Very Glad, Chalk, Rhombus, What is the Meaning of Petra, Practical Grab-bag, Delicate, Slap-Up, Butterdish, Withering, Oh Good This Again, Rectory, Dreamboat, Rectory Dreamboat, Hoax! Hoax!, Scotland Yard, Partially Wiped etc