Eat Tatoo Dead Tiger

Back in university, when I wasn't slaving over dusty history tomes at the Baillieu Library or down at the pub downing VBs with mates, I had a soft spot for industrial music—no, not the pretender for the genre from the 1980s and early '90s, pushed by bands like KMFDM and Leæther Strip, but the 1970s British movement of aural bowel movements, pushed through on spliced and bandaided tape-loops by Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, and later by Australian acts SPK and Orchestra of Skin and Bone.

So, obviously I'd also been an admirer of like-minded U.S. label Auricular Records for quite a sizeable chunk of their 20 year history, and more recently I got a reminder about them from my mate mAth Lewis, a.k.a. Noisepsalm, who released through Auricular in 2008.

Late last year, I got in touch with Alan Herrick, one of the founding people behind the imprint and also a member of Nux Vomica, and found an incredibly approachable and open-minded guy who was suddenly encouraging me to send through tracks.

I bundled together 19 tracks of some of the more expera/noizy/silly cut-up stuff I've rattled together under almost 20 different aliases, some of which were cut in 2008; others way back in 1998. Alan liked what he heard, and hey presto! ...we have the collection out on CD and digital download through Auricular as of Friday, 13th February.

Eat Tatoo Dead Tiger is the moniker I gave to the 19-tracker, and this isn't a case of misspelling, honestly—it's named after my favourite t-shirt, a sublimely bizarre tee I bought a few years back in a discount store in Kamata, in downtown Tokyo. That tee is also the cover art.

The music on this release is definitely not my Little Nobody style (as all over the place as that can get), but steers more back towards those aforementioned grand masters of industrial iconoclasm, mixed in equal bits with reverential nods towards (and rather desperate attempts to be like) Si Begg, Speedy J, Cassetteboy, Basic Channel and Tal—along with allusions to unrelated heroes of mine like George Sanders and Orson Welles, and old '50s sci-fi flicks.

Whether or not it gets anywhere near these far more talented people is open to conjecture. I'm also open to assignations of crap schlock, if that better captures the over all result here.