SINCE THE ACCIDENT Technical Reference
The STAref was originally published as an eight-page booklet with handwritten text and collages by Meredith Adams. This reference reproduces the text of the original, which has been discontinued due to cost. Sections have been interpolated to reflect changes since that time.
Watson's note: This version taken from SevCom Booklet 5. Italics are from this version. I added the bold text to make the song titles stand out.
"This is the way I remember it. Richard found an old 78 record with only half the vinyl left and spun it by hand. The tape sat in the dust for about two years. We wanted the voices on the other side and came across this falling gentleman instead. I made 4 copies on reel to reel out of sync so it sounds like he's lumbering around in the dark with the needle bashing into the sides. With an old fossil like that we called him a relic of the empire. On the original Australian pressings this track starts in the run-in groove.
Martine was in a Queensland pub. An old man tried to sell her a clutch of religious records for a drink which quite rightly she didn't think much of a deal. He had to give them to her, she had to give them to Garry (if you heard them you'd want to give them away too), anyway the trick was to drill extra holes through the label, bash the excess vinyl off the side and see what you got. What we got was some sheissaffen cracking "...the voices of a million angels..." most sick like, to which we added much pomp and ceremony on the rhythm composer with with souped up delay and the synth harmonics which were a visitation. The record at the end had twenty-cent pieces all over it which rolled all over the place and there's a dollar or so still to be found which are no doubt God's royalties.
With Houses Still Standing we started out leaning on a cassette of Varresse and you can still hear some of the horns in the background. A lot of the monumental thuds are the MS20 dealing hurt to the input stages of the majority of the studio equipment such that all the little red lights pattered along with the beat. These agonies were transferred to a tapeloop much longer than normal necessitating a bust of Napoleon being adhered to the top of the machine, the loop passing around his neck as in a noose. Simon uses a very strange chord structure on his guitar for this song which has the strings detuned to various degrees. The bass and voice are overdriven and the vibes are synthesized.
Gashing the Old Mae West was originally recorded as the main component in an Australian/English Multinational Muzak project (organized by Mark Osborne in Coventry) which required the piece be 6 minutes in length. All the loop components were filched from the same tape of Hindi film hits ground through various gaps in the studio graphic equaliser. For example the flanged percussion sounds to the left and right in the chorus are people dancing on tables, the counter rhythm at the end is a squeeze box. This beaing a standard size tapeloop it extends around the takeup and head housing and through the sides. It is dedicated to Boyd Rice. This track has been used as the soundtrack for a play and by a Canadian dance company on television. It was once (1986) issued as a 24-minute 12" single.
Dead Eyes Opened is a pop song, a last minute addition to the rest of the album to bring it up to the length of the original cassette. It has gone on to be a favourite in dance clubs around the world which says something about it (and dance clubs). All sounds are various Roland sequencing devices with some manual Poly6. The screechy solo at the end shows what nasty things a Casiotone will do when passed through a suboctave pedal. The voiceover is by Edgar Lustgarden, well known in the UK for his Scales of Justice TV show. To make the original 12" version we played the album version twice with different mixes and cut them together, which is cheating. The track was recreated in 1985 for Nettwerk, this time with 16 tracks and FM synthesis, but the original [remix] has remained the most popular and appeared on the Bulkhead sampler.
[Golden Boy:] Being great fans of Sammy Davis Jr. what respect is greater than to pervert the musical that made him the star that he is today? The sounds of fists hitting flesh, basketball thuds squash racket happy baby sad baby and head through plate glass. The Poly6 has a gasoline enema the MS20 screeches and the world lies awake with the sheets rolled back. We had to cut the 2nd half of this song off to fit it onto the record, to make up for this the track should lock groove.
Old Virgin pressings opened side 2 with another lock groove (they chucked a fit when they found out).
Next up is a track Godsong from our 1982 live shows being the Voice of Iran through Kawai 100F, TR808, 'bass' and 'guitar' synths and a taped orchestra at 1/2 speed. The voice fills the whole side of a cassette with news breaks and commercials interpolated. The tune is much the same, the 'bass' and 'guitar' seem quite happy to pray for ever and have to be ushered out clutching prayer wheels & incense and the like.
Next we have Epilepy 82, again from our live shows of that year. This one is tricky so you'll have to watch closely. Now, we fold a tapeloop so, and record drum sounds thus, here we place a pulse signal with a hi-hat sound, run a line from the desk to John Blades' Pro One, load a sequence here and behold we have a sequence clocked by a tapeloop. So add two sections of Gamelan orchestra, a lecture regardng membrane depolarization, baying wolf and yapping cat, mad gorilla and serve. When we remixed this we added a wolf baying every now and then stuck in a digital delay. We have recently been contacted by Dr. Fritz Dreifuss with a scolding for the use of his voice on this track and await his displeasure.
Exploring the Secrets of Treating Deaf Mutes was recorded in the days when there were no such things as cheap microcomposers. To get a multitude of sequences going we we used a click track on the tape clocking the signal processor on the MS20 feeding the only sequencer we had. The MS is at the best of times a cranky beast, here all sorts of mis-firing leads to the occasional doubled and dribbled bass beats. The original of this was instrumental, when it came to remixing it for the for the record Garry had a go at crooning the vocals and then screamed them from the other end of the room, direct to mixdown. The solo is a tape bowed on a dictaphone, the female voice is my mother not sure what she is reading but trying to be precise about it.
Brassiere, In Rome is palindromic (as are other other S.H. tracks elsewhere). A whole section of religious drivel on tape was chopped at equal intervals and passed to 8 track where it was mixed down and passed back to 1/2 inch backwards. This backwards image was then mixed in with the forward elements. Then the Pope in Australia 1970, then Garry thought we could do with some bells at the end. After some attempts at live recording and a go with the 1812 Overture I finally filled a room with windchimes and double speed recorded their permutations. The clangs are Chinese gongs, the pangs are green ceramic owls.
Wasps was recorded at a hotel in Hobart, Tasmania, drunk in front of the telly."
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