So, we’ve finally done it. We’ve finished our mixtape, and now it’s up online for youse lot to hear, download and pass judgement on. Exactly 36 minutes of unadulterated misery, copyright infringement and misguided political posturing split over 4 parts for your convenience (and totally not just to get around Band Camps upload cap).
You can get it for free from soundcloud, or if you’d prefer, Band Camp. You can see the full sample listing here.
Enjoy! And let us know what you think.
Easpa Géag - We Are All Destitute
What with burning out on listening to Irish music, horrible equipment failures, crippling addictions to Words With Friends and getting distracted by various experiments with video (more on that later), it’s been absolutely forever since we’ve last uploaded a song.
Well not any more. As usual you can download it for free from Soundcloud.
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Notes:
This is our attempt at a Dubstep song. Which was much more difficult than we thought, considering we were making it all out of samples. It’s still only a demo, we need to go back and add in some proper dubby reverbs and delays, but that’s something we need to do by hand and it takes FOREVER.
The song title, and artwork, is a reference to We Are All Prostitutes by The Pop Group, quite possibly the greatest Post Punk song ever. It still sounds just as fucked up four decades later. Naturally, Maggie has been swapped out for Charles Haughey.
Naturally.
A word on the “various radio talk shows and ads” segment though. It’s a sample of a much longer sound collage Bomb Cruach created a few years back. It was based around the Cut-Up Technique, an idea put forward by the Beat Poets (notably Gysin and Burroughs). In their early experiments they would cut up various newspaper reports on the same story, and then rearrange them at random, to discover the “true truth” of the issue.
Bomb cut up an ordinary cassette tape, so that it only lasted around 5 minutes. They then spent the next 2 hours or so listening to news reports, talk shows, adverts and end of the dial music stations, recording fragments from each before fast forwarding or rewinding the tape to a different, random, location. When it was finished they had a nonsensical, stream of consciousness distillation of what was going on at that moment in time.
It just so happened that this particular piece was made around 2009, just as the recession was breaking and everyone was panicking and everything was going tits up. It’s quite an interesting, if paranoid and apocalyptic, piece. Maybe we’ll post it a bit later on.
WU-2 - P.R.I.D.E (rules everything around me)
Yeah, we went there. Free download here.
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And, of course, C.R.E.A.M by Wu-Tang Clan.
Easpa Géag - Black Is The Colour Of My True Loves Heart
It’s been a week since we put up a new track, so we decided to do something about that. This ones a surprisingly cheery number about ending a relationship.
As usual, soundcloud, free download, share around, blah blah blah. Yiz all know the routine by now.
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Notes:
This was the first track we started working on, way back when. Though the main body of the song has remained more or less the same throughout, it’s been changed so many times it’s hard to keep track of. As a result of this, Countess Markiebeatz’s parents have horrible, Clockwork Orange style seizures whenever they hear the bassline, such is the level of exposure they got.
Excluding the tracks we’ve done that feature a bunch of samples from Movies and TV Shows, this is probably the most amount of samples we’ve used in one go. Towards the end there are 9 different songs playing, all at the same time. Which you have to admit, is kind of impressive, no?
The songs title is a parody of an old folk song called Black Is The Colour Of My True Loves Hair. The first mention of it comes from Appalachia, though it’s believed to be based on an old (probably lost) Scottish folk song. It’s also found an audience outside of Folk music, and entered into several Jazz songbooks. Most notably Nina Simone’s, though Patty Waters version has to be mentioned for sheer mindblowing freakiness.
The artwork is an edit of the promotional poster for Intermission, which is a great film you should go see if you haven’t.
Easpa Géag - Bolshie Dick Revolution
This is just a short stupid song that doesn’t really serve any purpose. It was originally the intro to Disco Pigs, but it was just a bit too long and a bit too much of tangent, so we cut it out and it became it’s own song.
As usual, you can download it for free from soundcloud to share with all your friends, or play very loudly in your car/home entertainments system. We don’t really care, it’s yours to do what you like with.
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Notes:
We’re not going to try and pass this off as satire or something stupid like that. It’s really just a bunch of people swearing set to music.
The titles an obvious reference to the Bolshevik Revolution. However, we didn’t know Bolshie was an actual derogatory term for people on the far left. We just knew it coz that’s what our Mums used to call us when we were being grumpy.
Also, it’s a terrible pun. We know that, and we’re dreadfully sorry. It was originally going to be called Aggro-Culture, but then we found out Captain Moonlight (an Irish rapper) had a trilogy of albums by the same name*. We may steal a bunch of other peoples music, but not their jokes.
If anyone has a better suggestion for a song title please, for the love of god, let us know! Our ask box is always open.
Also, the picture we’ve used is of Charlie Haughey, who was a giant dick. Doesn’t stop it being hilarious. Never quite found out what the context was though.
* Which are very good and you should totally check them out.
Easpa Géag - Songs About Focail
It’s been a while (well, 2 weeks) since we’ve put up a new track, but here it is! As usual, you can download it, and all the other songs we’ve made available so far, from our soundcloud, for free as well. You should probably do it pretty quickly though, before someone finds them and tries to sue us.
We never set out to make a song so heavily based around bands associated with the Richter Collective (though we admittedly did toy with the idea of deliberately running with it), it just worked out that they put out a lot of bands with a lot of songs that had samples at the right speed. We do quite enjoy the fact that we managed to make a song (almost) entirely out of Punk and Hardcore samples that doesn’t really sound anything like a Punk song though.
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Notes:
The song title and artwork, are based on Songs About Fucking by Big Black, who aren’t Irish but you should check them out anyway because they’re fucking amazing! It’s a pretty iconic album cover (and name) and there have been several parodies over the years. Our favourite is Kid606, who went all out and named one of his albums Songs About Fucking Steve Albini, complete with amusing/distressing artwork. It’s really fucking good if you’re into droney analogue stuff.
It’s also a pun on the fact that, unlike most of our other tracks, there isn’t really a message or unifying theme behind it, we just liked the way the samples sounded together. In short, it’s about “fuck all”. Yes, we do still find that joke funny.
Easpa Géag - Revolution Summer
In honour of the Occupy Dame Street camp being shut down - apparently to make way for the St Patricks Day Parade - we thought now would be an appropriate time to post this track.
As usual you can download it from our soundcloud and share it far and wide.
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Notes:
This track was an effort to move away from straight up Hip Hop influenced, beat based stuff, and make a track that sounded like a “proper” song. It was one of the first individual tracks we started working on, right back when this project was first started. It was, for a time, going under the working title of Revolution ‘09 (a reference to The Beatles’ track), which should give you an idea of how long we’ve been working on this project.
The name we went with in the end is taken from the Revolution Summer era of Hardcore music, which formed the blueprint of what would later go on to become known as either Emo or Post-Hardcore, depending on how pedantic you want to be. On a side note, Bomb Cruach and Captain B-Boycott are huge fans of this particular era.
Also, we’ve know the girl Ugly Megan are named for, and we’d just like to take a second to refute that claim. Not only is she an all round lovely, and quite attractive, person, but at least one member of this group has been harbouring a massive girl crush on her for years. So if you happen to be reading this … just sayin’ …
