The music here is complementary listening to that found on the Civil Dusk site, being an archive of recordings made in 2001-02.
Laughtrack was the name under which I (somewhat randomly) attempted to self-release the 'Amusements' single in 2001 (the first three songs here). The basic tracks were recorded in a loft on a four-track minidisc recorder, with vocals added later in a spare bedroom on a slightly more sophisticated Zip disk recorder (both boxes no doubt now consigned to some kind of music technology black museum).
The tracks were then scrubbed and polished by Mr Chris Butterworth, and a remix was supervised by Mr David Meme. I then got a thousand of the little buggers pressed up (only £50 more than getting 500!) and set about getting it reviewed and securing a distribution deal...
Radio 1 said "intense", Rocksound magazine said "divine", and the fanzines said "awesome", "breathtaking", "beautiful", "majestic", "gloomy", "morbid", "cynical", and "depressing". And for a while, the 'Severance Mix' was even seriously considered as the theme music for a peak time BBC consumer help programme (no, really!).
Unfortunately, the disties said ’no thanks’, and so it only made it (hand distributed) into a few of the London indie stores.
Of course, this then left me with nearly a thousand CDs sitting around. The eventual solution: give 'em away. So, with the help of friends, I basically distributed them directly to my potential core audience by giving them to people outside of gigs by Muse, Mogwai, Six by Seven and Haven (who all conveniently played within a few weeks of each other at the time). If by any chance you're one of the people who got one, I'd love to hear what you think...
JUST ADDED - I had planned to do a second self-released single after Amusements, but the above experience kind of put me off! However, I did get as far as recording an instrumental demo of the proposed follow-up - a song called 'Santa Mira' (the name of the town in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers film fact fans) - before abandoning the idea. It's gloomy and slow, but rather nice I think...
Anyway, having failed to do it myself, 'Under Compulsion' was recorded as a demo to try and get a 'proper' record deal - but despite attracting some interest, it didn't happen. I did however personally hand a copy of this track to a rather startled-looking Ed O'Brien from Radiohead - I think you'll agree that Radiohead have subsequently based much of their musical output on it :-)
When the labels who said they liked Under Compulsion wanted to hear more, I sent them a song called 'Useless Love'. You can judge for yourselves why I never heard back from any of them afterwards...!
Anyway, to hell with the industry - now you can download these tracks for free (enabled!) and hear how wrong they were...
Cheers, Joe
