Striped Paint For the Last Post

The Moon Wiring Club know exactly the right mixture to use to avoid the risk of boredom. The alternation between fast and slow pieces is just as sophisticated as their mixture of styles. Haunting tunes, easy-pop variations, electronic-folk music and even an eerie shuffle are interspersed with little sketches to provide an evening of balanced entertainment.

The whole world is enchanted by their tunes. In Germany, Taiwan, Canada and across Scandinavia people trip the ‘light fantastic’ to their music. But what is it that makes the music just so appalling? Paris Green, the reclusive orchestrator of the Moon Wiring Club sound, has earned himself the name ‘Lonely Crank’ with many of his followers, just as others respectfully address him as ‘O Lordy Green’.

However, when the first recordings of the Moon Wiring Club were returned from the Gecophonic laboratories, he knew something was lacking.

‘The music did not have the right atmosphere to suit the decaying landscape within my mind’, relates Green. ‘So I undertook necessary techniques to ensure the clinical nature of electronic sound was subjected to the arbitrary suffering that nature and enchantment provide to those who know how to find them.’

Quite what techniques were undertaken remain unclear, and Mr Green is not forthcoming on the subject. Various rumours that circulated with the press of nocturnal ceremonies regarding the master-tapes remain the supposition of the more enfeebled. But, whatever the method, Green had hit on the idea of making a record which not only reproduced music of a ghastly nature, but conveyed a ghastly mood as well! It was a feat as simple as it was brilliant. Critics marvelled at the music ‘with sound effects’, and record buyers now had just the thing to wrong-foot their party guests. As a journalist once said before he died : ‘With Green, it is really the background sound that makes the music’.

Paris Green’s philosophy regarding music-making has been vindicated:

‘Music can only be live and free if the people who make it are disconnected from reality’.

One of the more unique aspects of the Gecophonic recording process is the actual recording venue - The Blank Workshop. A ‘home-from-home’ for the musicians involved, it is in part an idyllic leisure center modelled on a motorway service station from the early 1970s, part underground Edwardian library.

In this rural seclusion, members and their kin meet at week-ends for jolly barbecues, hold parties, play shove ha’penny or sit in the fireside of an evening.

‘Those’, according to Paris Green, ‘are the most enjoyable hours, where stories are told of events which have not yet happened. Here plans are drawn up on how their last hours are to be spent.’

The Green musical holiday home is equipped with everything the holidaymaker needs. There are eight bright double rooms, a large lounge, kitchen, bar, cool spots, stereo installation and television sets, impenetrable barriers, and every bedroom has its own bathroom.

Whenever an event occurs, the musicians confer with each other by telephone. One will provide a cheese board, another will be responsible for the sandwiches, another for the salads, while another will produce fried sausages and black pudding, etc.

This division of labour has proved successful and is also continued on the ‘morning after’. They all share the work, from making the beds to making the coffee, from tidying up the remains to washing up the dishes, so that everything is in apple-pie order again for the next visitors.

We have just taken a glimpse behind the curtain.

Laurie Feather-Dodds. SUPER EMITEX magazine.