Attack Of The Killer Cleavage

The Beat Electrons - Arthur, Phil and I - opened for the White Label Music Christmas Party gig in Windsor yesterday.

After an age of hanging around we paraded into the hall wearing our flashing dealy boppers and twirling our whirlies.

We opened with Veil Nebula (iTunes link), which went rather well, I felt, and then Soupçon (iTunes link). As I don't recall posting the lyrics before, here they are...

in the soup of my vacuity
i hazard paralysis
entrails dragging
through the soupbowl of my life

oh soup
oh soup

biscuits dripping
saucers cracking
advancing downwards
bloody minded with a knife

oh soup
oh soup

each congealing morsel
treacled crawling
soft wet sighing
across the soupbowl of my life

oh soup
oh soup

asparagus soup

After that we went into the Christmas Classics section. Last Christmas and Merry Xmas Everybody. They bore little resemblance to the originals. (Think Satisfaction by The Residents. iTunes link)

I suspect Ann Shenton was the mastermind behind the, uh, distraction that came dancing up to us in the form of a voluptuous Goth with the kind of décolleté top that leaves men cross-eyed, grinning and startled like a deer trapped in the headlights. My polite requests for her to vacate my control zone were ineffective, so after a while I relinquished the pitch rod to her, letting her play it with her - well, let's just say the music had a rather jiggly, bouncy quality to it for a while.

Oh my.

We finished with an industrial wall of sound, "Power Station" for which I brought the Panic Box into play for some ring-moddy screams and growls, in conjunction with my newest electromechanical effect, which I call the VLS ("Very Long Screwdriver") as it is, in fact, a very long screwdriver. (The shaft is 42cm long - that's how long my very long screwdriver is; very long.) By holding it in the pitch hand by the non-conductive handle and touching the metal shaft with the index finger you can instantaneously smack your pitch up by an interval related to (amongst other things) the angle at which the VLS is presented to the pitch rod.

A track making use of the VLS will appear on my friend Fabio's forthcoming album (title not known - I'll post something when it is released.) I do know the track is called Binary Pulsar - I contributed the title and the theremin track that was later improvised around. (I offered an Italian name for the VLS, as the album was recorded in Italy. "La bacchetta di intervalli" - The Interval Baton or Wand.)

Typical audience feedback after our set: "That was the most fucked-up thing I ever heard. Brilliant."