gnawbone.unhinged
i heard pinking shears and bought mandy, indiana's entire catalog. musically, this is a really good time to be alive. time machine to a simpler life? no thanks. this album makes the 6th mass extinction & collapse of civilization worth enduring
Favorite track: Pinking Shears.
Join
now to receive all the new
music
Fire Talk releases,
including this album
and 213 back-catalog items,
delivered instantly to you via the Bandcamp app for iOS and Android.
You’ll also get access to
supporter-only
exclusives.
Learn more.
A four-piece experimental noise band that formed out of the fertile Manchester scene, the group initially came to fruition after vocalist Valentine Caulfield and Scott Fair met sharing a bill with their former projects. Joined by Simon Catling (synth) and Alex MacDougall (drums), they have together generated a sound that is at once chaotic and precision engineered, where chance operations are manipulated into percussive geometries, and gnarled guitars sit in thickets of distortion around which vocals spin knots of lyrical repetitions. Their first recordings emerged around 2019, with a smattering of early singles released not long after, culminating in 2021’s critically acclaimed ‘…’ EP which saw the band draw early cosigns including a remix from Daniel Avery and support slots from the Horrors, Squid, and Gilla Band. The latter’s Daniel Fox mixed several of the tracks on debut album ‘i’ve seen a way’ alongside Robin Stewart (Giant Swan) and the album was mastered by Heba Kedry (Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bjork).
Crucial to the album are effects wrought upon the sound by a clutch of unlikely off-site recording locations with novel acoustics, including screaming vocals emitted in a Bristol shopping mall and live drums recorded in a cave in the West Country – the latter session interrupted by literal spelunkers. Other sessions happened in Gothic crypts, where the band's physical bass frequencies and experiments with volume competed with underground roadworks and upset a yoga class above. i've seen a way is a manifesto for these moments of openness and disruption, with sessions in more controlled studio environments spliced with spontaneously captured lo-fi phone recordings, including a field of Swiss cows captured by McDougall while hiking: Fair elaborates that "these locations offered something acoustically, but would traditionally be thought of as having the 'wrong' characteristics for producing a 'good' recording. These spaces imprint on the sound: It's not about a lack of access to more traditional recording spaces – it's about us capturing things happening in a specific place at that moment."
credits
released May 19, 2023
Mixed by: Scott Fair Robin Stewart Daniel Fox
Recorded at:
Wookey Hole Caves
The Mount Without (Crypt), Bristol
The Nave, Leeds
Soup, Manchester
Engineered by Joe Jones. Vocal engineering by Alex Greaves.
Mastered by Heba Kadry.
Drums on tracks 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11 performed by Isaac Jones.
Mellotron on track 11 performed by Thighpaulsandra.
Cover art by Jared Pike
Rear photo by Harry Steel
Design and layout by DR.ME
The enigmatic punk-rap duo of Justin Pearson (The Locust, Swing Kids) and hip-hop producer Luke Henshaw make their long-awaited return. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 7, 2024
Every sound here is made using Megan Mitchell's voice, even though the music often sounds more like Earth’s vibrations than a human singing. Bandcamp Album of the Day Mar 28, 2023