u/0xdeba5e12

this one'll be familiar to those of you who have been here a while, or who've picked up a copy of Trip Hop Isn't Dead, Vol. 1, but here's the slightly rearranged and remixed version that made it onto Bog Sorcery II: One Lip to Earth & One Lip to Heaven. first full piece I made on the SP-404mk2 (after composing BS1 on the SX). the seed for this piece was planted while i was playing around with some haunting chops from a 1960s exotica record called "Return to Paradise", and i had this idea of writing a song about Eden, the creation of life and its transformation in death or resurrection, that would bring out the utterly uncanny strangeness of the process -- of something numinous and unfathomable taking form in flesh, or the strangeness of flesh itself coming into being for the first time. this took me back to Videodrome, of course, from which the song takes its title and one obvious sample, and to the film's weirdly religious overtones. i've always loved the way Cronenberg could mix horror and erotic bliss in the fascinations that grip his protagonists, and the notion of viewing Paradise through that lens (without any attempt to belittle, deflate or defile the idea) ended up animating the song.

on the album, "The New Flesh" is placed as the A-side's closing track, and the point where the uneasy epistemic hubris played out in the three preceding tracks -- Do the Voodoo with it's "yeah uh uh uh i know know know know" (sampled from a zoom call), Omphalos with its "i've never been, i've never, i've never been wrong", and Seaman with its "nothing's going to happen to me, nothing's going to happen" -- breaks apart into something more mysterious.

the radio play dialogue you hear at the beginning is from Pat Novak for Hire, an absolute gem of a 1940s hardboiled detective series that you can find on archive.org, which i've listened to in its entirety more times than i can count

and while i'm spilling the beans here, lemme also say that the Arabic vocals you're hearing are from the wonderful early 20th century Syrian-Egyptian singer Asmahan. they translate to "my whole life" and "i promised you my heart. they cut short your days"

I think some of you might've had a peek at this one, earlier, when it was still a work in progress. Here's the version that made it onto the album (and the video that made it onto the VHS tape). The cratedigging was good to me when I was putting this one together, with some absolute gems from the dollar bin making their appearance, like the country song on Radio Shack's CB radio themed LP (the "I'll never be", which here is flipped to sound like "under the sea"), or the vinyl by the German singer whose song about a sailor I sampled for reasons both aesthetic and utterly asinine. A third record by a trio of crooning sisters got me the "way up in the blue" bit, and a record of whale sounds gave me what sounds here like a horn section. Bit of dialogue from Knight Rider makes an appearance as well. Fun times.

Third single from Bog Sorcery II: One Lip to Earth & One Lip to Heaven. Cooked this one up on my 404, half delirious on a hospital gurney. Lost my appendix, gained a beat. Kinda the highlight of that particular week, looking back. Hope it finds you all in better health!

Set up a little homepage for Swamp Magic (my band with u/SaltmarshWitchcraft) and our solo projects (Bog Sorcery, already familiar to the regulars here, and Saltmarsh Witchcraft, Zain's solo project (which is still germinating, but which you'll certainly have the pleasure of hearing someday soon!). A one-stop destination for all your wetland wizardry needs!

Second track off the new album, Bog Sorcery II: One Lip to Earth & One Lip to Heaven, which dropped about an hour ago this afternoon! Hope you enjoy!

In about four hours' time -- that's 9pm Central European Time (or 4pm in the maritime swamplands) -- Bog Sorcery II: One Lip to Earth & One Lip to Heaven is gonna drop! Hope you see some of you fine folks in the youtube chatroom ✨

Huge thanks to everyone here who's provided such a fertile ground for these songs to take root! Your encouragement, inspiration, and influences have meant a lot to me. This is a really cool little corner of the internet, and I'm honoured to be a part of it.

Here comes the big finish to the Bog Sorcery 1: If I’m Not There to Receive These Ideas, God Might Give Them to Prince retrospective (PWYC on bandcamp this week). The spoken samples in this one are from a ridiculous 1973 movie called The Day of the Dolphin. The choir samples are from a 1924 recording on an old 78 of The Wiseman Sextette. I liked the idea of ending the album on a sincerely happy note (even if, like the rest of the album, a little bit morbid). Fun times!

Just two days until the big sequel drops! The youtube premier will be on Friday at 9pm French time, which I'm pretty sure is 4pm my time, 3pm Eastern, etc. Dungeon Radio has a pre-order page open now, so it's a good time to call dibs on a cassette. 10 copies will be available from their website, and the other 10 I'm taking to stock our merch table at Sappyfest. I'll probably dub a few more copies to sell from the Swamp Magic bandcamp page if we're able to move some units.

Getting near the end of this little Bog Sorcery 1: If I’m Not There to Receive These Ideas, God Might Give Them to Prince retrospective with the penultimate tune on the album, “Empty Guns, Empty Boots.” I think the working title of this one was “Cowboy Trip Hop”, which, as a subgenre, should really get its day.

Three days left till Bog Sorcery 2: One Lip to Earth & One Lip to Heaven drops, along with all these timeless classics gathered together for the first time on VHS!

The fifth song on Bog Sorcery 1: If I’m Not There to Receive These Ideas, God Might Give Them to Prince and probably the one responsible for introducing me to all you fine people! It was after posting this one on r/triphop back in the Fall that Candlewax reached out to me to ask about doing a remix (which he did, and it’s a banger — I’ll post the link to that one in the chat). We became pals, and a few weeks later he invited me to set up this subreddit with him. A genuinely fortunate series of events!

The backbone of this piece is a bytebeat composition i’d written some months beforehand (cool and weird little genre, btw — worth checking out the r/bytebeat sub if you’re curious), warmed up with some vinyl sim, reverb and a slow low pass filter sweep. The main melodic element is what sounds like tubular bells, from an old 78 by a percussion ensemble that I’d found on archive.org. One of these days, I’ll write another tune like this, as Waxy’s been urging me to do.

I would have forgotten that I'd scheduled this vid to drop today if Big Lez hadn't kindly reminded me! First track off the new album (Bog Sorcery II: One Lip to Earth & One Lip to Heaven, dropping in JUST ONE WEEK through our favourite dungeoneers!). I don't want to spoil any surprises, but if anything here feels familiar to you from our last round of Exquisite Corpse, it's not a coincidence -- that's where this ditty's seeds were planted, so thanks to my predecessors (shoutout to u/mcAlt009 !) in that chain for some of the synth sounds used here. (So if you're still waiting your turn in this month's beat relay, you should probably, in the interest of fairness, skip this. I forgot that there was still a week left on the clock when I scheduled this vid to drop on yt.)

Had some fun with my homemade squarewave fm touchtone telephone synth (Phaedra, to her friends) on this one, the model:cycles fm groovebox (for the drums), and the filthy sounds of this new bass synth pedal I recently picked up. The samples come from a beloved cartoon about an east coast family burger joint.

One of my personal favourites and the first track on the B-side of Bog Sorcery 1: If I’m Not There to Receive These Ideas, God Might Give Them to Prince. The brass sample was so satisfying to play that I think it planted the desire to get a horn in me. That sounded lewder than I'd meant it to. I'll leave it. Shoutout to Cab Calloway for his irresistible rotoscoped dancing. The man had moves. (He returns as a dancing walrus in the BS2 section of the Bog Sorcery Show VHS, in case anyone's wondering.)

About a week to go till Bog Sorcery II: One Lip to Earth & One Lip to Heaven drops, so it's shill time, pals. Here's a little promo reel I put together, featuring the album art that will soon be gracing the tapes! The angel and organ collage was made by a German artist named Maressa Axtmann to accompany a short story of the same name that I wrote a couple years ago, when it was published in the now-defunct online litmag, Cream Scene Carnival. (I've been trying to reach Maressa over any channels I could find for the past few months, and haven't been able to get in touch, so I'm hoping she's cool with me reusing her gorgeous art here.) The square kufic Arabic calligraphy is mine -- huge thanks to u/SaltmarshWitchcraft for patiently coaching me through that process! It's the title of the album in Arabic:

شفق وحدة للأرض و شفق وحدة للسماء

And of course, no pressure, but if anyone wants to help me shill this thing, I'd be very grateful, and will happily shill in return when needed. <3

The fourth track on Bog Sorcery 1: If I’m Not There to Receive These Ideas, God Might Give Them to Prince and the A-Side closer. I feel like I was getting the hang of more complex and layered compositions with this number (and the B-Side opener that followed). Gary Peacock's drum break, sampled from the Fantods' "! at the Sun" really drives this song, and we've got some of Dan Gallant's vocals, sampled from the same tune, EQ'ed to sound like a distant megaphone. The main bassline on this track is just a few notes I played on the stylophone beat (not a bad instrument, that thing, and the extremely rudimentary built-in bass synth has an interesting attack to it as the metal wand touches the pad), with a bit of "oo, wowww" here and there that I played on roundwounds. (One of the little rules I gave myself while working on this album, and which I still stick to, is that I never sample a bassline.)

next in this series of posts giving Bog Sorcery 1: If I’m Not There to Receive These Ideas, God Might Give Them to Prince (now PWYC on bandcamp) its due before the sequel drops (on July 10th, through Dungeon Radio), here's the third track on BS1 and the first I ever produced with the SP-404SX (or any 404, for that matter). All the sounds in this one were sampled, again, from the Internet Archive's wonderful "78s and Cylinders" collection, with the sole exception of the weird metallic groan that comes from Phaedra, the telephone synth. felt like a bit of a goof at the time, but it grew on me, and it'll always have a place in my heart as the number that set me off on this path. I kinda love the weird sense of suspended time in it, and the way it stays with this one ridiculous line far longer than it needs to. (I had fun editing the video to make Binko the Bear's slow, swaggering descent down the staircase impossibly long, to match this feeling.)

I think this might have started with a joke about me making some "wub wub" music, which was just me chopping, flipping and looping a "wub" sound plucked from the way this vaudeville singer says "boudoir".