Saturday, October 22, 2011

A Safe Substitute

A Safe Substitute the Storm Bugs’ magnum lo-fi opus originally released on Cassette by Snatch Tapes in 1980 is now available on red vinyl from Harbinger (cat no Harbinger 096).  Tracks from A Safe Substitute have appeared previously on compilations but this is the first time it has been released in its entirety - a faithful transcript of the Snatch Tapes cassette release complete with a scaled reproduction of the original sleeve artwork and full liner notes detailing the recording of each track.

Here are a few words on A Safe Substitute from the Mutant Sounds blog
‘…this is everything a fan of left field D.I.Y. song structure perversion (U.K. stylee) could hope for. Much of what's heard on A Safe Substitute (fragments of which would re-appear elsewhere) were generated from that great old British analog beast, the VCS3 synthesizer, a machine used to more tonal ends by the likes of Franco Battiato and Pink Floyd and here providing swaying pendulums of corroded bloop, greyscale warble and hollowed out rhythms triggered from filter fucked arpeggiations, upon which they graft passages of alternately morose and plangent song structure fragmentation.’

Hitchcock still by JS