Dogfood and Dan

Scott Walker has been omnipresent lately (at least in some circles) due to the BBC Proms event last night. Scott Walker is one of those artists that I tried to get into for a very long time. Friends would buy me his records. They would be put on at parties (rather sedate parties). Heads would nod sagely as his baritone voice sung of lost loves and melancholy and I couldn’t help but think “Can we not just put the Betty Boo album on again?”. As time goes on and you get a little older you stop pretending about many things, and one of those things for me was that I had any love for Scott Walker beyond Jackie. And even then Marc Almond and Momus did it better.

Sooooo…since no-one reads blogs these days unless they’re in easily digestible list form, allow me to present three songs I’d rather listen to than Scott Walker.

Vanilla – No Way, No Way. 
 


Yes, yes. The video is terrible and it’s the very worst of the Spice Girls bandwagon jumpers but it’s long hanging fruit. We’re here for the song. And the song is even worse. It is musical dog-food. Poundshop dog-food from the good old days of Poundshops selling health hazards instead of brand names. Gloopy, gelatinous horror that leaves only the taste of ash. A queasy mess staggering home stopping only to vomit up the refrain of “no way, no way” at the most inopportune moment. It is grotesque. Nothing on The Drift can compare, Scott Walker could not dream of creating something so painful. Even if he had a can of dog-food and a stick for percussive use and locked himself in a darkened room for a week with nothing but an open mic for company. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

Steely Dan – Do It Again.


I know an awful lot of Steely Dan fans. Damn near everyone who was on Soft Bodies seemed to like them. You could understand it with the more traditional songwriter types, but then you’d also have people doing ambient/noise/harsh bastard techno being fans. The Dan bridges the void. At least with most people, I have and probably always will be of the opinion it’s MOR bobbins….AND YET, I’d probably rather hear Do It Again than the Seventh Seal.

Slade – Run Runaway


In 1983/84, Scott Walker started to reinvent himself with Climate of Hunter. And so did Slade by morphing into Big Country for a bit. Scott Walker would never have thought of that, and thus he found himself outplayed by Wolverhampton's finest, disappearing from view until the mid 90s, wondering what could have been.

Righty-o, enough sacrilege. WE HAVE MUSIC OUT. Please do download and/or listen to it if so inclined. Ta!

Wake Up Gastone

We have a new EP out today. It is called Wake Up Gastone. It's the second in a series of four track EPs we intend to put out for the rest of the year. Listen here! Now! Here! Now!

Four songs. Couple of instrumentals, another pop number with Jodie on lead vocals and a piano/vocal thing with more Jodie vox. It is, as all these EPs will be, completely FREE unless you want to give us some money. We are not proud. We WILL take your money!

Hard cash is not the only way you can support us though, there are far cheaper and probably more effective ways. The only reason Quimper has any sort of audience is because people have been very lovely about telling other people about us. Our relationship with what's left of the music press mostly consists of us both wishing the other would go away. Our relationship with most people mostly consists of wishing the other would go away, come to think of it. The absolute best way you can support us is by spreading the word of Quimper. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Tell podcasts. Tell blogs. Tell labels they should release our records. Tell the next person you see in the street. Tweet like a bastard. Poke people on Facebook. Can you not poke people on Facebook anymore? Then poke people in the street. Demand your local radio stations play our songs. Go forth, become our dervish hordes. SMITE IN OUR NAME.

Or, y'know, just tell yer mates that we're quite good. One of the two.

If you haven't heard our last EP, the fine people at the Gated Canal Community show played a couple of tracks from it on one of their recent shows. Link below.


Hopefully should have another EP ready for late August/early September. Possibly with a video. We've also been talking about playing live again, I think we've got a better way of doing it than just hiding behind (or in front of) video projections. The downside is that it's a way that involves me running around in a dog mask and hedge trimmer. Early days, anyway.

More Dog

The Vision and the Void

There's a lot of talk at the moment about the possible impending demise of Soundcloud. Once upon a time it was a useful tool for easily hosting music, it's long since devolved into a bloated mess that gives birth to a myriad of bots, scammers and assorted bumpf that now makes up the majority of "listeners". I'm not really sure it's potential passing should be mourned, it's time has passed, but there is a pile of stuff hosted on there could well be lost forever. It does make you think about the permanence of what you create. Maybe it's why vinyl is still so popular. CDs can rot, tapes aren't exactly known for their reliability and digitally hosted songs can potentially disappear. Vinyl may well not have the best sound quality, but that's probably not the point. You do wonder how many of these records are actually played. They're to be stored, collected and saved, the familiarity of the tried and tested. Etch yourself in history.

We keep toying with the idea of releasing something on physical media. The only Quimper songs that have been available physically were on the first Soft Bodies compilation. CD just seems a bit flat, and we see-saw on tapes. On one hand few people have tape players and I'm damn sure hardly anyone plays the bastard things. On the other the more people moan about tape releases the more appealing releasing one looks. Eat our hipster tape. Choke on spool/etc. Ah well, we'll see.

Sunday evening has given way to Monday morning. Gah. Time for disco.

Dogs

Egg

Overdrawn

Dear mercurial reader flitting from webpage to webpage in a desperate attempt to fill the void, gaze upon a montage of images from the video for our first music video, Overgrown. The song has aged very badly, but the video hasn't. It was directed/created/animated by Jodie, who tends to do everything in Quimper that involves visuals, art and talent. I think the extent of my involvement was spinning a wee circle thing and wiggling my hand around. I may have even propped up a puppet and/or bit of wall at one point.

You can have a look at the complete thing below. Yes, the drums are awful. We were new, we knew not what we do. Or did. We still don't.




Mastering = Vocal Preset on Everything

Work continues on new material. About 12 new songs that are very close to being done. We'll be releasing them as EPs which will remain pay-what-you-want. As soon as we bother to finally sort out our social media then we'll see about finding someone with a pleasing lack of sense and taste to release something physical that you can put on a shelf and forget about. We've had more downloads of our stuff than we've got Twitter followers. Which isn't exactly difficult I know, but that's cack handed even by our dubious standards. We must connect to you all like a big octopus of digital commerce. Bloop.

Nose Dogs

Music Box

Sometimes people release music that doesn't make me want to vomit.  In fact lots of people release music nowadays that doesn't make me want to vomit. I spent a rather long time in an indie hellhole so my natural response to new music was to reach for an icepick and go stab-mental. And I never had an icepack handy and so a vast swathe of terrible landfill guitar bands were free to roam free and leave their musical droppings all over the place. A terrible tragedy that could have so easily been averted with a bit of foresight. Oh well.

But enough of what could have been. Let's see what is.

April Larson - You Stand in a Valley Between Dunes




There's been quite a few albums inspired by Dune, Bernard Szajner's Visions of Dune probably the best I've heard, but it's got a bit of competition from April Larson's new album. It's a bit less ominous than some of her other work, in fact I'd probably even call it rather beautiful at times. Sometimes. Other times it sounds like something nasty is ready to nip out of an impossible angle and rip reality apart, so there's that. I'd buy it if I were you, best to be prepared.

Severed Heads - Donut



Fun though it was to see Severed Heads play the "hits" last year, it's good to see something new from them. Nostalgia can only power a reanimated corpse for so long. You need something new to give it true new life, otherwise it'll just collapse into a pile of goo. And between this and Beautiful Arabic Surface / Cheerio Inner Moon from last year, they've very much been moving forward. Donut is about as far removed from the previous single as you can get, a borderline demented jaunt into easy listening. I have no idea what they'll do next. Long may that be the case.

Trespassers W - Tenderness



More people should talk of Cor Gout, he doesn't seem to be known much outside of the Netherlands, which is a pity as he's very, very (very) good. He's been involved with all sorts, but his work as part of the band Trespassers W is what we're looking at here. I don't actually know all that much about him, I've just been picking up various Trespassers records over the last few years and they grew on me slowly but surely until I realised that I've become a pretty big Trespassers W fan almost by mistake. I do like it when that happens. Mécanique Populaire have been doing a fine job in re-issuing his back catalogue, and I think this song is my favourite.

We Are Now Rushing Into Zone B

Look at it. Isn't it beautiful? Two disco space pilots stand side by side with a giant monolith of an arcade cabinet. And it is a giant. Darius was played over a three screen set up. Unheard of at the time, unheard of even now. Though to be fair, arcades themselves are pretty much unheard of now.

The Darius series of video games were made by Taito, and normally consist of a lone pilot shooting a seemingly endless wave of robotic space fish. There is chrome. Much chrome. There is also music, and that's what I'm going to be enthusiastically flapping about today.

Taito's "house band" was Zuntata, who wrote a great many soundtracks for Taito's games. That was pretty unusual was a company to have a house band in itself, but Zuntata would also perform live on occasion and their scores were very atypical from yer usual video game soundtrack. Anything from experimental electronica, fusion, synth pop and gawd knows what else. In fact the best way to get across their sound is probably just to play you some tracks...


VISIONNERZ




From Darius Gaiden. Probably my favourite Zuntata track. A haunting sprawling joy of a song which is at extreme contrast to the robot bastard death fish action that's happening on screen. One of my favourite things about it is the fact it doesn't actually stop when you finish the first stage. It continues on into the second whilst evolving all the time. Lovely.


B.T. Dutch




From G-Darius. An ominous little number that builds into a relentless march. Industrial sounds, samples and whatnot clunk along unevenly. A wonky march for a fairly wonky game. Polygons for the eyes, polygons for the ears.


Hinder Three



From one of the more recent Darius games, which has gone through some revisions and updates and can now be found it it's final(?) form on the Playstation 4 right now under the name Dariusburst Chronicles Saviours. One of their more unhinged tracks, a chattering nonsense that gives way to fanfare before returning to gabbering. Queasy. Very queasy. Not enough songs are queasy. We need more quease.

There you go. Music to shoot robot fish to. Get shooting.

The Invisible State

Well hello. And here we all are again.

I am Johnny. You may know me from chart unbotherers Quimper, barely active art sloths Werdwolven, various music blogs from back in the day and until very recently, the owner of Soft Bodies Records. I took a pillow to it while it was sleeping, it didn't feel a thing. More likely you haven't a clue who I am and are quite confused to why you're even here in the first place.

Paragon Night Scene is basically a place for us (Quimper) to put all our bits and bobs on display and to keep anyone interested in our latest projects and happenings updated and informed. I shall also ramble about things that I like. It's a blog. It'll do bloggy things.

Things That Have Happened 

Midnight Snack

Our last EP and video have been out a wee while now. You can see the video above, click on Jodie's big green face and ye shall be anointed. Thanks to anyone who downloaded/shared/played on their podcast or just generally interacted with the EP/video. Extra special thanks to anyone who actually bought it and sent some money our way. We tend to do pay-what-you-want downloads and it's always a nice surprise when someone gives us a bob or two.

Juliana 99



Seeing how Soft Bodies was on it's last legs, I thought I'd sneak out a glorified solo album before it shuffled off into oblivion. It's a combination of fairly recent(ish) stuff that either didn't fit Quimper or was going to be used for something else (but wasn't). You've got some aborted soundtrack work in there, a couple of tracks for when I decided I was going to do a "dance" EP (ie, I got drunk with a drum machine and some samples and regretted it in the morning) and a couple of other things. Er, enjoy?

Things That Will Happen

More EPs

We should (hopefully) have another EP ready for the end of July/beginning of August. The plan is to do EPs every few months and try and enough people interested in what we do so that either it's viable for us to put out an album ourselves, or we get someone else interested in releasing it. Another video is planned, but probably not in time for the next EP.

More Jodie solo

Jodie has finally got another solo release ready to go. More details on that when the label it's coming out on are ready to spill the beans. And they are fine beans. If you liked Circles & Holes and Klepsydra, you'll go full ham for this.

Soft Bodies Bleed Out

The final Soft Bodies release will be one last compilation featuring various SB related people and a few new faces. There should be a new Quimper song on there somewhere.

That's pretty much the plan for the forseeable. As always, all plans are subject to change due to boredom and...well, it's normally boredom.

Thanks!