4 minute read
TEAM PICTURE
We're releasing an album called 'The Menace of Mechanical Music' on June 12th. It's our first proper record and we're looking forward to finally being able to present to everyone this body of work that we've been creating for the past year and a bit. 'TMOMM' hasn't just been a recording project for us, there's been a really distinct visual aspect to the album that has been just as important to us as the sound of it. We were privileged enough to receive support via Help Musicians 'Do It Differently' fund last year. This allowed us to collaborate with Leeds-based artist Louis Byrne on the vast majority of the imagery surround 'TMOMM'. One of our number actually went to college with Louis, so we have a personal connection with him, but the work he's done over the last few years has been phenomenal, cosmic, and unique. We did a callout on our socials to which Louis responded, and the subsequent decision to work with him was not a difficult one to make. There were two separate influences which we sought to synthesise for this project with Louis. The first was an essay by an American marching-band leader called 'John Phillip-Sousa', published in 1906. Said essay is an uncannily portentous work regarding Sousa's fears of a world in which the way we interact with and create music is entirely automated, and the effect that this would have on our collective cultural identity. The imagery of his essay is a black mirroresque strand of bio-mechanical dystopian humour which we felt particularly lent itself to Louis' style. The essay has long been on my mind since I first discovered that it was a thing via a random web-content collation site probably close to a decade ago. It's one of those things that just sticks with you as something that will be important to you one day, but in a way that you don't fully understand yet. The fact that I had stumbled across Sousa's essay via an automated system lent it an extra layer of significance, as did his renown as a director of marching bands (we had adopted full marching band regalia for the touring and press imagery of our previous mini-LP 'RECITAL'). We decided to lift the title of this essay to use as the name of our album.
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The second influence was the triptych 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. It is a work of such mad subversion that I can barely believe it was completed in 1510. Seriously, image search that muvva and be awed. In a weird coincidence, Louis had just been to see 'The Garden…' itself at its place of rest in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, so he was well boned up on its nightmarish psychedelia. Over the course of several months we corresponded with Louis as he created his own triptych drawing from both of these sources. The tonality and specific dioramas of Sousa's essay, and the characterbased hellscape of Bosch's 'Garden'. The results of this collaboration were fruitful. We now have a trio of prints, each one corresponding to a set of images described in Sousa's essay, from idyllic garden of Eden featuring a strange mechanical bird, to the final image of a burning city under
the looming dominion of some messed-up part organ, part Kaiju mega-beast. As well these posters, which have been screen printed by Ellie Way of Wakefield's 'The Art House' in super limited quantities, the characters Louis created to populate his triptych have formed an important part of the images accompanying each single from 'TMOMM'. Our very own Ross Francis, bass player and graphic designer par excellence, has adapted Louis' work into the cover of the 'TMOMM' LP, and we have heavily featured the photography of another collaborator of ours, Sam Joyce (with some crucial direction by Lou Kuster), in both the packaging of the album and the media surrounding it. The photography with Sam and Lou was created one day last July. Amongst other scenes it involved us baptising one of our number in the river behind Bolton Abbey, an act which drew a small crowd of curious onlookers. This activity, combined with the long, white surgeons coats we were wearing for this shoot led some observers to believe we were some kind of strange religious sect initiating our newest member, resulting in a couple of awkward conversations (and a round of applause) after we emerged from the river. These visual collaborations I've written about here have been as crucial to the development of 'TMOMM' as the recording relationship we had with producer Matt Peel during its recording. We are very excited to be releasing something that we feel is both visually and aurally unique, and I believe that 'TMOMM' is truly a testament to the depth of talent present in the artists Yorkshire is capable of producing.
