Making and distributing your own music has never been easier. Bedroom projects that would previously have been confined to a small circle of friends can now reach a worldwide audience in the wink of an eye. Gone of the days of mailing cassette demos with begging letters to kindly DJs and hoping for the best. The airwaves of cyberspace are alive with a free for all 24 party offering continual newness and immediacy.
The problem is that this wave of home produced and self released music has now reached tidal proportions and is positively overwhelming. Coupled with this, quantity has never been a good substitute for quality.
Undeterred by this, UK's Bob Constant and Tim Garratt working as A Sofa Made Of Dust (ASMOD) have braved the flood and embarked on a project to produce an album a month to be made available for free through Bandcamp.
Spontaneity and improvisation are the order of the day to make such a project viable. ASMOD might be compared to Lucky Dragons from LA who utilise everyday sounds to make ad hoc songs. These aim to capture the moment rather than to produce anything more refined or enduring. A key difference is that much of Lucky Dragons' prolific material stems from interaction with an audience while ASMOD's tunes come from home experiments.
It would be easy to dismiss these two albums as the drunken ramblings of two guys with too much time on their hands. Their self deprecating promotion even encourages such a judgement. Wine At Lunch is said to have been recorded "during a 6 hour noise and wine session at Tim's house" while its follow-up was apparently conceived "in a beer and smoke haze".
Garratt's also plays more conventional songs as Panic Attract, either as a solo acoustic artist or as part of a four piece band. With Constant, if the songs come out as straight it is more by accident than design. Lyrics are streams of semi consciousness, a kind of automatic singing without the intervention of rational thought . In other words, mostly gibberish!
Examples of these are Croak Crowk, which sounds like a lost language somewhere between Welsh and Arabic, and You Have A Dour Face, which features wordless moans against an electronic drone backdrop.
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No Patience is far from being a straight pop song (sample lyric: "you got that dress from Marks And Spencers") but sounds relatively normal in this company.
Otherwise, the only recognisable tune on Wine At Lunch is a less than reverent version of Silent Night. The single cover on A Throne For Mummy is a slurred rendition of Neil Young's Helpless. Everything else is an improvised mix of electronica, folk, noise and drone.
There is no sophisticated technology to render any of this more palatable so what we hear is an unrefined sonic sketchbook. The bleeps on Spaceship sound more like those of an ice cream van than anything interstellar. By the end of Wine At Lunch tracks like The Announcement and Love Song sound like a serious hangover is kicking in. What begins as lively eccentricity gradually takes on a more sinister edge and ends with a short but menacing lullaby.
This trend is even more pronounced on In A Throne For Mummy where the tracks are referred to as "disturbing witch blues and distorted loops". DIGNITY! sounds like the ranting of a crazed preacher and titles like That Little Mouse and Strawberries may sound harmless enough but are enough to give young children nightmares.
I don't think my life is any more complete now that I have heard two album's worth of A Sofa Made Of Dust and won't be crossing days of the calendar until the next instalment. As an experiment in sound, the project has its merits but twenty seven tracks and two records in I'm inclined to say 'enough already'.
Listen for yourself via these links:
Wine At Lunch
A Throne For Mummy
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