Some More Terror, the third album, was released five years ago today on Sept 23rd, 2014. It was one of the last releases to come out on the popular, underground label Desire Records for the European market before it went inactive. In North America it was released on a small cassette label called Sanity Muffin, which was run by an old acquaintance of mine from back in the 90s hardcore/punk years.
Released between Fiction Prediction (2013) and You Never Know What Might Come Next (2015), the release took a very notable sonic detour as it was a collection of semi-improvisational experiments which were mainly absent of vocals and were more soundtrack and mood influenced, with that mood generally being a hushed trance-like feeling of oncoming dread. Most of the tracks were written in one session and employed a very different writing and production process than the other releases.
At the time it seemed like a great way to try things outside the contraints of the “popular music” writing sphere: getting away from verses, choruses, 4/4 drum beats and pop music melody lines — elements of music that I sometimes get sick of hearing. With a long interest in film soundtracks and ambient music, it was nice change of scene for when this record what being written and to just feel a bit freer to work on sound design rather than songs. And although the music was more subdued it intentionally took a bit more of a political and antagonist approach that other releases.
It was released in cassette and digital formats, with the cassette edition being sold out a good number of years ago. The Desire and Sanity Muffin versions had slightly different covers and completely different inlay graphics (see gallery below).
Since this release the idea has been to do another similar release along the same sonic guidelines, but with more attention to composition, songwriting and production to the tracks as would usually be exercised on any number of the other releases that have more of a “synth pop” structure. Such a release will see the light of day early in the coming year of 2020 as a counterpart to the next upcoming release, When Push Comes To Shove, which will be out in November 2019.
Desire Records was also home to a number of other artists including Keluar, Ike Yard, Project Kokomino, A Terrible Splendour and countless others, and it was the label that released And You Will Find Them In The Basement – a compilation that I was part of the curation of, releasing a collection of tracks documenting artists in a general London-based scene at the time of its release, in early 2013.
Finally, there was one video done for the track “Modern Dread” from the album, a bit of a surreal one:
Cassette Packaging
