Musically, I think it is the most successful track on the album at trying to get a trippy electronic rock vibe going on, and contains my personal favourite vocal performance on any of my solo songs.
Fun fact... the nonesense chat and orgasmic vocals in the intro were sampled off some video footage of me and my good buddy
Sam Avery - The Learner Parent who I played in a band with back then, the legendary Dosser Beard. Interestingly enough the footage was filmed on 9/11 and was meant to be a 'message to the future' documenting our thoughts on the events of that day (after approximately 12 hours of drinking in raw pubs round Liverpool).... Now that Sam is a famous comedian it could work as superb blackmail material, apart from the fact that I come off 200% worse than him in it, which means our message to the future will go unheralded and Sam will remain un-blackmailed....
Many moons ago I used to make electronic music under the name Zaceus Zinetti, this track originally started off as a ZZ track. I ended up putting some atmospheric guitars on it and I realised that I had created something beyond ZZ...
The baseline on Ghost Worlds Dog is very 'riff' based as opposed to a typical dancey type thing, pretty dark and menacing. I was and still am not into any 'happy happy joy joy' music, I also don't believe that heaviness necessarily means loads of guitars.
When I figured that this wasn't going to be a ZZ track I tried putting a more standard rock/metal beat on it and it just didn't work. The reason being that back then (2001) nearly all music software was geared towards dance and electronic genres, so the best result was to go for these sampled trip hop esque loops. Any attempt to do realistic sounding rock drums just couldn't cut it on my primative soundblaster powered 96 megabyte PC...
The degraded sound of the drums is a happy fault, as the software I was using gave you more tracks if you lowered the quality, so I think this was done at probably 11mghz hahaha... thing is, I loved it then and still do. On my latest gear it would actually be a struggle to get this sort of dirty sound, modern stuff can be a bit clean.
It's an instrumental, but the title relates to a guy me and a friend
Count ZOrg von Traveller (who I did the band Dog Muck with) saw whilst making a film (Segmenta) in Madrid. He was so pale he looked like a ghost, and he was with a dog who was wearing a jumper... one of us remarked 'Check out ghost world's dog!'
I really like the guitars on this and I spent ages getting them 'just right'. I used a gold top Antoria Les Paul played through a Fender Dual Showman...
I have often wondered what this would sound like played by a band... maybe one day it will occur live....
At the time of recording this album, I was largely influenced by the multitude of remixes that were done of
Killing Joke: Official Pandemonium album. Conceptually 'We Have Bift Off' was meant to sound like a remix album, even though they were in fact the original mixes. This blast of sheer insanity was recently played live by
Tommy Concrete and the Werewolves albeit a re-interpretation, a pre-mix if you like....
So this song originally
came about through Jim Hodge, who currently provides vocals for Mastiff. He elected that he was going to sing on my album, so this track was put together especially for him. The whole process of writing and recording the entire thing was less than an hour, which is the best way in my opinion, I think the frantic inspiration comes through pretty clear. Jim added vocals to a few more tracks I was working on, but more of that later...
Yeah, so back then I was spending most of my Friday evening's clubbing at The Electric Ballroom in London, soaking up the multiple genres on offer there, hence this track being a mixture of metal, drum and bass, industrial and various nonesense....
The lyrics were originally written for
Shitball and cover the concept of rubbing one out over an ex whilst depressed.
Love this track, totally mental sounding
Gotta blow my own trumpet and say I dig this track, there are a lot of musical risks taken on We Have Bift Off, some work, some don't, this one works.
So it started out as a drum and bass track that I was working on to be used under my Zaceus Zinetti moniker, but felt like the baselines could be really cool riffs. So I tried it and was really into the results.
I put a bunch of effects like flangers and delays on the beats to give it a swirly trippy feel and the whole thing started to take a form I was really pleased with.
Recently, when working on Unrelaxed 2 I was seeking to try to invoke the atmosphere that this track creates, you will have to wait and see as to wether or not I was successful or not with that....
Really chuffed with the solo in this, its a nice psychedelic wha affair that really fits the song. Pretty much channelling
Ed Wynne of
Ozric Tentacles on this, one of my all time favourite guitarists. Although I love what they do, I always felt like I wanted to make music that sounded like the Ozrics came from an alternate EVIL reality.
Lyrically this was written when I was still doing personal type lyrics, deep and emotional and all that. Not really into that kind of style anymore, so I am happy that it is largely vague... The singing is a lot more traditionally metal on this track, with a noticeable James Hetfield influence mixed in with atmospheric screams..
It's one of my more popular tracks, if streaming stats are to be believed...
Skulls and Fire
Now, there is no point in this if I am just going to be showering myself with positivity whenever Ido this. So it has to be said that I think personally We Have Bift Off is a bit of a hit and miss album, which I am cool with because it was my debut after all. Anyway, I do think that Skulls and Fire is one of the 'miss' tracks
:(
This was before I learned the concept of quality control, as in I put every track I worked on, onto the album, rather than just the ace ones. Also, the 90's had just finished and a prevalent trend in the 90's was bands trying to make their albums reach the full 80 minutes of a CD... So theirs my excuse...
One of the things that I would change (if I could go back in time) would be the samples on it. I think that makes the album sound dated in places, although it was cool at the time so whatever.
Paradoxically, I think the addition of samples on this track, which were put their to 'save it' sort of do, but not in the right way... Thing is, I wasn't very happy with the track, and although I think I do some good vocal performances elsewhere on the album, I was still relatively new to singing and couldn't put anything decent on this track... I had some audio outakes of blues legend
Andrew Halfdeaf McLatchie talking whilst in the studio with
Shitball, wherein he was basically saying that everything was improved with more 'Skulls and Fire' so I figured if I looped him saying 'Skulls and Fire' and had that as the chorus then the song would be complete... It did improve it, but not enough when objectively reviewing it in retrospect.
The solo is quite good, trying out some styles that I got much better at in later years...
I think the out of any sort of context samples of hawks screeching juxtaposed with loops of
Matthew Dennett giggling brings a level of surrealism that is the one saving grace that actually convinced me to keep the track on the album (I considered leaving it out when uploading it to streaming distro)
Anyway, so people I present Skulls and Fire
