Buk Buk Buk EP

Cover: 

Our second EP, called "Buk Buk Buk", is out on net label Monotonik, just in time for Christmas!

This second collection features tracks written for the Katipo shows and the Malty Media radio show.

Some links:

• Monotonik's releases page
• Archive.org
• Download the whole EP (zip format, 23MB)

Or you can listen to the business right here:

Chicken Nocturne

Michael and his wife Amanda keep chickens, and they make these intriguing noises when bothered in the middle of the night. Michael duly recorded these signal-generating chooks and added to them some record crackle, sampled synth wibbles, and computer-generated strings. The resulting confection introduces us gently into the EP.

Hilbert Space

Hilbert Space is an extension of Euclidean geometry into higher dimensional spaces. It also has nothing much to do with this track, but plenty to do with a physics book Stuart was reading when he came up with the first version of the track.

A more integral component of Hilbert Space (the track) is Patrick, a Beijing tour guide for HK-based Wing On Travel. Heard here on the final day of our 5 day tour (featuring free food poisoning!), he exhorts the group to make sure they haven't forgotten anything, by reciting that famous Chinese proverb, "you can't eat dinner without your false teeth". The rest of the track features numerous phasings and skittery boingings, and the entire mix is periodically wrenched through some computerised tape delay to create an appropriate sense of wooziness.

See to her

This stygian techno, featuring swirls of reversed guitars and vocals sampled from a well-known pop group from Liverpool, demanded some Serious vocal samples, and, deciding that there's nothing more serious than Greek tragedy, we went YouTubing for an English translation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Sure enough, we found something of surpassing fruitiness, and introduced it forthwith.

Butcher

This track features spiralling Chinese drumming, a snippet from a Vaughn Williams oboe concerto (transposed down to make the oboe into a saxophone), MELLOTRON STRINGS, and a poem by New Zealand poet Vincent O'Sullivan, "Butcher on Life in General". While elsewhere rather droll, the poem's final line speaks quite semi-seriously of the comforting, purifying (and perhaps a little stultifying) isolation of our fair country. Michael went on a bravura vocal sample gathering spree to spell out each word of the poem in a different voice.

My little aircraft

Despite commencing from the potentially glum combination of the groove of John Lennon's 'Mother' and some Bauhaus vocals, this EP's final track turns out fairly uptempo and good natured. The vocal samples come from personal heroes of ours, Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod of the immortal 1980s British TV show, the Secret Life of Machines, a documentary series about how everyday machines are made. These samples come from the episode on radio, with Tim waxing almost mystical about radio waves, while Rex extolls their practical application in aviation.