MYSTERY SPRING - THE GIRL WHO HID BEHIND TREES

TOR56. Released July 2017.


01. Nightwalking
02. Can't Put This Fire Out
03. Angel Face You Will Drive Us All To Hell
04. Saint Mary Kills Me
05. Split the Blues
06. What to Do Today
07. Open Water
08. Stone Pickers
09. Slow Moving Cartwheels
10. Last Rites, Maybe


Me and my dog, Billy (that's him on the CD artwork) looked forward to Fridays last winter. We would go round to Marc's and drink tea, eat biscuits and play music together. What started out as a bit of a jam has turned into this album.

We had a great time making it - despite occasional dog noises and technical problems with Marc's recording kit.

It was quite a spontaneous process and although the album took a few months, most of the recording happened quite quickly.

A highlight for me was playing Marc's Ultranova keyboard on 'Nightwalking' - there was a childlike joy in twiddling the knobs and feeling like you are playing the BBC Radiophonic workshop.

This is our first Mystery Spring album, but we hope there will be more.

- Catherine Reding

GOATHERDER - SOOTHER OF GRIEF

Released June 2017. TOR55

01. Soother of Grief I
02. Short Term Memory Loss Replaced by Nostalgia that Never Existed
03. Soother of Grief II


Between late 2014 and early 2017, I archived any recordings I made; field recordings, demos,
experiments and so on. I put them to one side, unsure of what to do with them.

Occasionally I would review an experiment or refer to a demo. It occurred to me that most of these
recordings would go nowhere, so I decided to give them a home.

In February and March of this year I 'performed' collages of these tracks, the live mix being the
performance.

The end result is like an aural mind diary; ideas and sounds all together. It makes some kind of
sense to me.

- Stephen.

BROCKEN SPECTRE - TERROR

Released April 2017. TOR54.

01. TERROR
02. Flux et Reflux (Excerpts from The Flood Tape)


The first release of 2017 is a posthumous one.

Last spring, Brocken Spectre released their only record and split. During the summer months, I went through hours of recordings of rehearsals, demos, jams and so on.

There were two reasons for this; the first was to collect together all the versions of a song called 'TERROR'.

Once we had moved into the space above Warwick Bazaar, we had microphones permanently set up, we could then roughly record all of our activities. 'TERROR' was played every rehearsal, sometimes it was three minutes in length, sometimes thirty. It had a loose arrangement and allowed us to explore what we could do. Recording it as a take alongside the other material never seemed an option; it relied on improvisation and a definitive recorded version didn't seem plausible.

The version on this cassette is compiled from various rehearsal takes, recorded December 2015 to January 2016.

The second reason for this archival release is to highlight an aspect of the band not represented on the self titled mini album.

During it's brief existence, Brocken Spectre played around 25-30 songs. Tracks by The Nightowl Sings, The Dead West, Hills! Werewolves! Run! and We Are the Wooden Houses were all tried out, but ultimately gave way to new band compositions. One song that stayed however was 'Angels of the Rain', from The Nightowl Sings album, "All Hail the Town to Town Troubadour".

We never recorded it as Brocken Spectre, it finished several early versions of our set and was always played as an additional song if we had time. It differed from the NOS version in that it had two moments of improvised noise which I have taken from the rehearsal recordings and added them to various moments of other noise, more improvisation, jams etc.

Running through this second cut up compilation is an extended jam from the legendary 'Flood Tape'.

Together, these two compiled tracks and the self titled debut represent Brocken Spectre. This cassette contains the strange, psychedelic and brutal noise element, played to no one and heard only by the band themselves.

Mixed by Alastair and myself in the Autumn and released a year since the band split.