Lo! Not To Be Played In Apartment Blocks, a fantabulous collection of classic Antlerland tracks has washed up upon yonder shore! Being the second chapter of the ongoing archives series, a follow up to Chindogu. Get cracking and download it right now at >>antlerland.bandcamp.com<< in a format sure to satisfy your particular format fetish.
- Subtropics
- Hit By A Truck Daily
- Temple Temple Temple
- Richland
- Brisbane Water
- Psychodrama
- Please Wait To Be Sedated
- Danceteria
- Tripover
- Britneydope
- Red River
- Shore
© COPYRIGHT 2012 Graham Freeman
Grudnuk Creations - Cat No. GRUD006
By way of explanation...
As mentioned in the lead, Not To Be Played In Apartment Blocks marks the second volume of the Archives Series, comprising a collection of material mostly released between 2001 - from when the name "Antlerland" was adopted to represent this - to around about 2006, dovetailing between the period covered by Chindogu to the first actual album, Friends Don't Let Friends Electric.
These tracks are as close as Antlerland got to releasing anything "officially", and even then, in a very grassroots, anti-Industry, take-it-or-leave-it manner. ( I should point out a few things. Most of the songs on this compilation are not presented as they were originally. Yes, I've done a bit of a George Lucas on some of them! Unlike the selections on Chindogu, these were imported into Renoise from the IT format, fixed up some of the samples, dropped a few effects here and there, sanded off some of the edges, while keeping the musical structure of each track more or less intact. Of course I also bind to Lucas' justification about putting in things I originally wanted to have there anyway. There were quite a few other tracks I thought about throwing on here, but I decided to cut it back to the twelve that best represented my output of the early '00s. The ones that were culled from this particular line-up will probably still get their day in the sun, with some likelihood of the next one being heavy on remixes and jams and presented in a DJ set style, as well as a "Worst Of" volume. (I am not kidding, I've pumped out a lot of dreck, and I am amused by the idea of actually dropping the really bad stuff on people.) But that's for the future. Let's concentrate on the now! Subtropics does have a long history, and I decided to kick things off with it, since it's got that old skool mod tracking flavour that, well, sucked me into doing this in the first place. Doesn't do anything particular complicated, a boopy hook, some rough sounding pads, and breakbeats. Lots of them. Originally released as a one-off who knows when, this remixed version only took a few hours to retool from the original .IT file. Hit By A Truck Daily was released on the 2004 Xmas single with Richland. It's another dub-influenced thing with a pretty heavy kick, I did a few goofy things with low pass filtering at the start and with shifting organs and that at the end. Temple Temple Temple was released at the end of 2002 with the first release of Wronghead (which is available on Wronghead Versions). Even at the time, I considered this a pretty primitive track with some heavy-handed use of breakbeats and such, but I really really like how it develops as it goes along and felt it made a good contrast with Wronghead, which was probably the most elaborate thing I'd put out at the time. Call it a chiptune and I'll shank you. Richland, as mentioned above, was released with Hit By A Truck Daily in December 2004. Yes, I was on a pretty severe motorik krautrock kick at the time (still am, actually), as well being heavily inspired by Stereolab. Logically, I pulled out all the stops (in the organ sense) and went mad with it. Brisbane Water was on the 2005 release with Red River. I was mucking around with a very short cello sample from somewhere and built up the whole thing around it as it plunked away relentless. For whatever reason the song reminded me of the summer holidays near the Central Coast of NSW, when the 80s stuff on the radio was actually contemporary and yet still terrible, and as a dirty inlander I learned to fear the salty, surging sea. Psychodrama ganged up with Britneydope on the 2006 Xmas single. The main sound was, I guess, a really crap attempt at a mellotron, of course once you put clodhopping beats and, it has to be said, a pretty irritating skank using chip keys. So, at the pace it plods away at, it actually almost sounds a little goth. Please Wait To Be Sedated was some grotesque monster that refused to die. Like, I think I started working on this in 2000 or something, and put out an earlier version sometime during the following decade. I like to think I was having a stab at about four different kinds of dance music (including those that had yet to be invented) and failing at all of them. And this pretty much kicks off the CrAzY hAlF (so crazy) of the set. Danceteria tortures a bunch of wailing diva vocals for your amusement. Are you not amused? (And goddamn right I used autotune on it.) This version was checkpointed around '05 or '06, from which I forked an extended mix that goes on for over another ten minutes which will probably go on that jam tape I mentioned in the introduction. Tripover backed up Dunga (available on Intercapital Daylight) on the 2003 Xmas single. This was basically an experiment in screwing around with time signatures and generally being obnoxious. It's... quite... terrible. Maybe some of you kids will like it, though. I think I paired it up with Dunga mainly to make that song sound respectable alongside it. Britneydope emerged with Psychodrama in 2006. It's a smart track pretending to be stupid. Well, that's what they say. Red River was released with Brisbane Water in 2005. I actually did vocals on this one. As in making popping noises with my mouth as well as that weird growling in the middle, yeah, that's me too. Despite putting my "voice" on this, I'm actually pretty fond of this one, particularly when it gets all echoey and timey-wimey in the end. Shores was included on a six-track demo called, imaginatively, Demo Number One*, which I sent out to a few people in 2001. This was the only song I actually heard on the radio. As far as "radio hits" go, it's a weird one. I was pretty keen on playing around with harsh distortion - the tones opening the song were cheap piano samples that were bit converted so low values became high and vice versa, creating a very harsh digital distortion effect - the problem with that is that it makes the mix sound crap. It still sounds a bit crap, to the point I was originally reticent about including it on the compilation, but heard in the context of the other songs, it seemed to fit, and moreover, seemed a good way to finish things off. So here we are. * Most of the remainder of the tracks on Demo Number One - "Judge Not", "Wronghead", "Solar Sails" and "The Device" - I continued to work on until they were eventually released on Intercapital Daylight. One particularly horrible specimen from that demo was banished from this plane of existence for being horrible.) Share and enjoy! - Graham Freeman
February 2012