First released on United Fairy Moons in 2006 and occupying the disused space between the Dead C and Marilyn Manson, Fuck the Memescape is one of a handful of industrial albums by a Dunedin, New Zealand artist, if not in fact the only one.... although I'm more than happy to stand corrected if this isn't true. It was a minor local sensation at the time, and one track, Valerie Solaris Spacestation, was the focus of a concerted campaign to bring experimental music to the local student radio station's weekly top ten. It also featured on one or two end of year lists and, you know, sold to people who I didn't actually know.

My eternal thanks are due to Mr Jimmy Currin, who released this baby to the wider world in its original form with a silver paper cover. Jim had asked me for a following up to my 'We Are Superior Beings', (also on UFM) and I gave him a complete album of folktronica, now lost in the mists of time and probably not actually that good. No, he said, I want something like what you were playing me when we were drunk on your porch last week.... big.... and loud......and with big loud guitars........

These are the tracks he meant, and, yes, they're good drinking tunes if you like walls of noise and electronic beats as well as whiskey. But they're leavened by the fact that around the time they were recorded, a very nice chap by the name of Adrian Webclaw, who had stayed at my house the previous winter and given me the guitar amp that I still have stored in the garage, died very suddenly of leukemia. Although we didn't know each other very well I was devastated. Combined with the fact that I'd just recovered from a pretty stiff dose of Dunedin depression, that explains some of the darkness of these songs, and the record is dedicated to his memory.

But at the same time, as Jim pointed out, Fuck the Memescape is also an album that's in love with the sound of really loud guitar riffs, and I had an absolute blast making it. It's become a very minor cult item, and should have been bigger if (a) there was any fucking justice in this world, and (b) if I'd had any kind ambition or organisation or anything.

AND NOW IT CAN BE YOURS.....


EDIT August 2015. To my sadness and shame, this write up contained a major factual error. It was Adrian Webclaw who passed away, and not his brother Martin who is still very much in the land of the living. My apologies.