A Spectre Is Haunting Europe

For those interested in our latest album, please hold the phone while we go about remastering the ten tracks. They’re pretty quiet as they are, and much of the density is not being brought to life with the raw mixes. We promise to make these tracks sound as good and as loud as possible.

And for those interested in keeping the unmastered tracks for posterity, download them while you still can. Within a week everything will be nudged, tweaked, and gain-boosted to “acceptable modern standards for popular music”.

The final track recounts a badly damaged festival environment, put on by an overbearing and delusional CEO of a small tech startup, demonstrating labour exploitation in the high tech sector since its early 2000s deregulation in British Columbia, a crucial factor in our local tech/social media boom over the past several years. However, as this is poetry or theatre of a sort, the license to exaggerate has been also fully exploited. Here developers sign contracts in blood, get actual strings attached to their fingers so that their keystrokes will not deviate from what their bosses and clients desire, and are eventually cannibalized in front of their children, invited for a special Saturday ‘hot dog day’ in the plaza outside the commercial high rise.

With that we bring you “BBQMS“, the tenth and final track, concluding the album Embers with the full-on Arrival of Late Capital, washing ashore with its Colonial overtones in Act One, rapidly dehumanizing and hyperindividuating through Act Two, and eventually eating its own means of production, workers, or tail. Don’t say we didn’t give a fair, accurate and timely account of the utter demise of Western Techno-capital. Hope you have enjoyed the party.

The social media divide rhetorical styles and common understandings as much as they mash us together into the same stylesheet. Here we have an example of dialogue gone wrong at the edge of the chasm, an argument going nowhere, as no one is listening. Instead we are diverging, multiplying, becoming dialectic, polar, weird to each other. And with this comes apathy. Depressing, isn’t it?

Track 9 from Embers, “Arts and Entertainment“.

…and the logjam of higher education breaks, recalling an ennui of gargantuan proportions. Besieged by youthful desperation on one side, and blank faced bureaucracy on the other, you better take it in your hand before you lose control, or get trampled under the Airstream Trailers of God parked outside the community college campus…

Track 8 from Embers, “Remote Controls“.

The despair of Empires gives way to strident defiance to unchecked growth, tempered by paranoid confusion between the personal and the political, ergo, “tapes all gone/games go home”. Games Go Home. With no further ado, we bring you Track 7 on Embers, “2M07“.

Commemorating 4 November 2008, we give you new music about corrupt rulers. The Bush Is Dead. Long Live The Bush. & A Spectre Is Fucking Europe.

Our paranoid, quivering speaker, who here opens up Act Two of Embers, believes that this whole Erection business is for real. Such is the self-made pomo victim-subject as mediated, cut up, cut off, chewed at the roots.

Next week we’ll try and escape this gloomy situation.

Two practices in and the ASIHE steamship is now officially firing on all cylinders, or steam-pipes, or what-have-you. We are pleased to announce that we’re now a four piece band on the lookout for live gigs, welcoming Ciaran on board as our new drummer. Pictures to come.

And oh yeah – had some rethinking about mixes for the Second Act of Embers. We will release Track #6 for your listening pleasure later this week.

The fifth song from Embers, entitled “Night Class“, is frigid poesy accompanied by the return of the frenzied chorus motif to remind you that this is a sedate tragedy, one of feigned deception and exhaustion from the toll of relentless desire. It can do one in completely. Let’s now watch our wallets; there are thieves about. And they typically have been made that way by being thrown in a dunce chair or bamboozled into seeing ghosts, etc. So yes, it’s the ghosts again, too.

So concludes what appears to be Act One of Embers. It neatly divides into two halves of five songs each, thematically. During Act Two all artifice is shed, and all truly dark and ruthless things start to percolate up that could never have been even remotely anticipated during the first Act.

From the sublime to the sardonic – the cosmopolitan to the local, Embers, with All Is Vanity, zeroes in on faux despair and includes the voices of the dead in the sound of clopping horses. It’s a song in love with its own satirical defeatism, and is carefully constructed out of obsolete pop tropes. A recipe for topping the Billboard charts, to be sure. Comment allez-vous?

Upon dozing in the ambience of this strange modern city we begin to dream, taking in all that’s ancient and buried and recognizing all of the wormholes between the dead and the now, the crumbled and the negotiating. Like limestone or oil, the dead are a midden from which we and our ideas and actions spring continuously; the symbiosis between decay and renewal are built under any city that’s truly alive and magical. Let’s party it up, all of us.

So continuing on from last week’s Track Two from Embers, (“Filoxenia“), we give you “Τσπος γεννησεως” (Greek for “Place of Birth”). Oh he seems poor, but oh he seems old. Or so it seems.