2. What weird whirlpool of sound avant the rhythm returns, to normal and the song begins? as if the Hypnotist were saying - listen, before you enter this strange place not only the image of a parismoon but also the mirror of a parismoon, i'd like to invite you to experience the reality at the heart of its mirror-world of gloss and sparkle. a distortion, & a lie, & a lazy one at that but that's the Hypnotist for you. these are the spectres of eighties nihilism and they loom large.
strange abberation at the beginning of parismoon one of those strange aberrations in time becomes part of the song. the tape speeding up every time it's replayed; the tape slowed down for a few moments during the recording of the song, or maybe due to some kind of flaw in the magnetic tape and used to record the song, but it's hardly going to come as a surprise to learn that parismoon was recorded in Redland, in a purple-walled attic bedroom on reel-to-reel tape, from the shelves by plastic ducks. you moved the tape recorder and you changed the mix.
1. discarding their bela bela personas the baleeshas also moved around changing their instruments and learning the hard way.
In the line drawing by Eugenia Knight, the baleeshas in 1980, they are not at the stonehouse those words have been added later along with the ambiguous phrase - 'bunch of grapes'. they are tapes in the stone, ghosts in the storehouse where they are stoned.
the baleeshas began as a duo busking in Manchester - where stolen bells rang at night in the cellar - and Paris, where in a hotel, the Stella, in the Latin Quarter, glum proprietors and their guests shuffled about the corridors like those blundering shadows with shrivelled hearts from the Vauquer boarding house in Balzac.
3. 'my power is failing 1979'
there are two rivals for the love of a woman - the Hypnotist and a magician of lesser powers. under the spell of the first she is little better than a clockwork woman, stripped of her personality and will. under that of the second she is berated: it is all her own fault. Thatcher's disgraceful project, to so divide and fragment our country as to make her statement, There is no such thing as society, a self-fulfilling prophecy, was just beginning - the nightmare was dawning on us all.
The Hypnotist was recorded on cassette in a community centre, the Inkworks. cassette recorders -- a small internal microphone, and if you pressed whatever was happening in the room --- tapes got stuck, tapes were unreasonable, tapes were magical, hissy, muddy, twisting and mangling between the tape spools like brown spaghetti.