At murder shed

Last year my band The Stumps met with two other bands - Birchville Cat Motel and Pumice - for a one-off 'supergroup' recording session. A French record label has offered to release the recording and it'll be coming out soon - we're calling it At Murder Shed. I've been working on the layout for the CD artwork, and this is an essay I've just written for the booklet.

It's raining but not too much. Cars running by on wheels of white noise as I'm checking outside for the others to arrive. Door knocks and they're here... in comes Pumice and Birchville and the rest of The Stumps and a couple of cases of beer which we immediately begin to devour.

We repair to the recording studio... it's what we call the recording studio, anyway... it's my art studio and the home of The Stumps. A giant run-down corrugated-iron warehouse in an old condemned industrial compound down the road, it's notorious for 2 artists, one party, gang-style fortess-ifications, two brothers from the same crime family and one brutal murder. It's in limbo and it's been that way for nigh-on thirty years. Times passes slow on motorway-designated land. Buildings age almost as you watch them... oil-stained concrete, weeds, rotting planks, pools of lichen, gutters hanging and gone, rodents, paint hardening and lifting and blowing away... ghosts...

Fall cassette in and on and blasting as we chat and pass round more beers and start to set up... suddenly Stefan is away, rattling at his kit while James configures his guitar's output for takeoff. Campbell is making electronic soup, deafening, and Antony plays louder than I've ever heard and my ears are ringing, bleeding noise, before we've barely begun. I've built a polyphonic bass drone loop which I'm laying waveforms over but my head is full of Sunn)))o and Sabbath and my fingers itching and aching, playing my lowered-4^th litany over and over and over and over. Campbell is growling, or singing or something and then I'm watching Stefan and he's watching me and we lock together and we're rocking and rocking... Campbell and Ant have combined and twine an agonising feedback pierce then without warning James tunes in and blasts off in a startlingly prosaic solo that climbs and climbs through registers to meet them...

And then we must break, exhausted, wind it down. We can't go on like this. But now Ant busts into a guitar riff which sparks Stefan into a furious march, some kind of a tattoo and we're off again. I'm watching him again and I slap on another riff and I'm watching him as we slip together and I'm looking at my feet and now I'm pushing my volume pedal, pushing it through the floor. I want to beat the bulldozers and the wreckin' balls... I want to knock the shed down around us somehow with my sub-harmonics. Something is rattling and Stefan gone mad with drum fills breaks us up and I could swear I just saw him throw his head back and howl. Campbell kills us with a sear of hiss and we slowly topple over into a warm, colossal drone.

The rattling is my amp. I'm wondering if my speaker is wrecked but I can't care now, this is too good for bummer thoughts like that to interfere with. I'm parched and bug-eyed and I have to drink a beer so I drink a beer. We have to relax for a while now, surely, we have to rack it back a couple. Antony starts poking little shards of cosmic sonar as us. Campbell is singing and humming and droning along and Stefan accompanies them, pushing into their interplay at acute angles and complex tangents. I've decided to hell with it and start stepping up the filter on the synth-drone and it gets rougher and rougher and rawer and louder and then James throws a raised-5^th feedback line all over me and now I'm as loud as I can be, as loud as I'm ever gonna be. This is our hymn, our prayer to the gods of music and beer and rain and friends and we transcend, climax together and it's all gone quiet.

The rain falls on the iron roof. Stefan's snare buzzes tiredly. Someone's delay parameters collapse into themselves. We pack up, drink more beer, turn the lights off and leave.

Stefan Neville:-drums, guitar, mad howling styles
Campbell Kneale:-electronics, death vocals, electric bagpipes
James Kirk:-photon-guitar, drums, smoke
Antony Milton:-guitar, beer, tools
Stephen Clover:-monophonic synthesizer, bass, Fall cassette