https://fandf.bandcamp.com/album/rental-yields-volume-three
Very proud to announce that I am part of the massive Rental Yields project by Front and Follow. The press release is below which explains the concept, basically I got to borrow material from one artist (Giant Head) for my track and someone else (Hannya White) got to borrow from me. Hannya's track was on volume two and you can see the video here, she heavily used 'Muscle Shell' from my last album but also some other bits and bobs and melted them into a satisfyingly distorted amalgam of terror. Many thanks to everyone who has given this airplay, Hannya is a tough act to follow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ksEIdT2cMY
Homelesness is an issue I have always cared a great deal about, having lived in Brighton and Oxford in the mid-nineties where it was impossible to ignore. Coming from a small village it was a shock to see quite how commonplace this situation was. Now, with greed very much back on the cultural agenda and the cost of living crisis it's hard to imagine how anyone is meant to find their way back up to safety and security. No-one should be denied a safe place to stay. Please grab a copy of at least one of these albums or donate to SPIN or a similar charity in your area if you are able.
So, onto my track 'Dot to Dot' which uses parts from the Giant Head track 'Fails'. Giant Head is an experimental rapper and visual artist from Nottingham. I started by taking that great beat, which was an interesting place to begin for me because I don't usually have a steady drum pattern to work with. I teased out some of the harmonies and expanded them vocally, and then decided I needed that amazing sub bass as well. I had a look at his vocals and cut out several tiny snippets where his voice rises and falls. Then using Google's Tone Transfer website I converted these samples into saxophone, trumpet and violin sounds which I then dropped in to create a groove. I also monkeyed with a couple of them for the start and the end. I then wrote a verse in response to his lyrics, as a kind of answer song. In 'Fails' he is exploring the existential dread of realising that we are all part of The System. My lyrics are about trying to sooth someone's troubled soul and help them find a route out of the despair. I took one of the lyrical snippets where he says 'dot dot' as my starting point and dropped him in echoing me. Then in the place of the electronic sounds he had peppered that track with I used some of my eerie woodwinds, bass ocarina for the most part and layered flutes on the bridge. I also built an intro section before the beat. As a random experiment I pitch shifted the beat which gave me a weird squelchy sound that I decided added something.
I am currently working on a video for the track which will appear on my You Tube channel and on here on the album release date, 25th November.
Front & Follow and Gated Canal Community present VOLUME THREE of RENTAL YIELDS – a multi-release collaboration project raising money to tackle homelessness in Manchester. Inspired (if that’s the right word – perhaps ‘motivated’…) by our current housing system, the project encourages artists to steal (or borrow, nicely) from another artist to create their own new track – in the process producing HIGH RENTAL YIELDS. Over 100 artists are now involved (the spreadsheet is fun), each one tasked with creating a new track from the sounds created by someone else – we are then collating the tracks and releasing them over the course of the next year. This is VOLUME THREE, featuring 25 new tracks and 50 artists. All money raised will go to SPIN (Supporting People in Need), whose purpose is to feed, shelter, clothe and generally support the homeless and people in need of Greater Manchester.
“We couldn’t move the body from the mezzanine. A yield curve is a line that plots yields (interest rates) of bonds having equal credit quality but differing maturity dates. The slope of the yield curve gives an idea of future interest rate changes and economic activity. One new ghost yet to come. For reasons of taste, Robert insisted on the cream bags rather than the green. The bags, therefore, were too flimsy to hold his rather substantial corpse. We considered slicing it up but, in full view of the busy grey quadrant, we felt this a rather fragrant move. His gymnasium access card slipped from his pocket and landed face down on the cold floor. Concrete ballast on a leaking ship. Upcurved yields, immature as yet. Bring me my Filofax, Sharon. And don’t spare the horses.”
Track list 1. Audio Obscura VS Secret Nuclear - Vacant Period 2. The New Emphatic vs Graham Reznick - Coming Home 3. Revbjelde vs Arvik Torrenssen - trixon psyykesoup 4. K of Arc Vs TVO - Secret Rite in the Stroudwater Suite 5. The Revenant Sea vs Gormless - Blank Loop Structure 6. Pettaluck Vs Giant Head - Dot to Dot 7. Megaheadphoneboy vs Soloman Tump - Guaranteed Returns 8. Jonathan Higgins vs Andrew Haines - a_single_point 9. Autumna vs bleepeater - Marks Land 10. Field Lines Cartographer vs Graham Dunning - Broken_Wires 11. Sone Institute vs Twenty Three Hanging Trees - Night Voyage 12. Her Majesty’s Coroner for Wirral vs Polypores - r_UKlandlords 13. The Metamorph vs Kinver Pond - Perspex Heliotrope 14. Concrete/Field vs solo1 - section 106 obligation avoidance module 15. Von Heuser vs Silver Tears - (Sunken) Scarlet Eyes 16. Lines of Silence vs Robin The Fog - Dead Yet 17. David Wallraf vs Opium Harlots - Houses in Slow Motion 18. The Ephemeral Man vs Kat Bryan - Long Way Home 19. Heavy Cloud vs Farmer Glitch - Inside your house; a place of mirrors and ghosts 20. Caleb Joyce vs Polyhymns - Nothing Was Happening 21. Decommissioned Forests vs Pulselovers - Rental Yields 22. A Beautiful Idea vs Repeated Viewing - Uneasy In The Sunshine 23. IVY NOSTRUM vs The Snaps Jar - AND MONEY LESS 24. Vex Message vs Sarmism – Xstabeth (in memory of David W. Keenan) 25. Shit Creek vs Letters From Mouse – cluttercup Mastered by Anthony Morrow / Additional words by Spenser Tomson