3. the view from the window in Rusholme Gardens, a setting of Jeff Noon's sci-fi novel Vurt (the flat where the darkroom was), because the flat was on the first floor often accompanied by a soundtrack coming up from the traffic lights at the junction of Wilmslow Road and Platt Lane - a traffic jam.
0. All four of these tracks were recorded in the darkroom, three of them on a Fostex X26 4-track cassette machine.
1. NB: Gaspard de la Nuit (1842) is a character invented by Aloysius Bertrand, an old man who 'may be the Devil' (Jeremy Noel-Tod in the introduction to the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem). Rather than suggesting that the figure of Mr Salvatore is devilish or that the inspiration for Mr Salvatore was Gaspard de la Nuit, which it most certainly wasn't, I am instead pointing out that when I read the prose poem in question it reminded me in some unexpected, pleasant yet sinister way of the strange character devised for the purposes of this song. Mr Salvatore makes things happen by spilling broken treasures from his bowl and mumbling, that's all. It's unnerving but there it is.
2. hey ray was an amalgam of two things - the character Ray was based on a person i knew who was very manic at the time - he came to the flat once and as we talked i tried to track his movements mentally, as i would've done with a video camera, and played them back later in my mind. in the replay as he spoke he wizzed across and along and around us. his speech was always manic except when he tried once to chat up the lovely Shamim Chaudhry at which time he became strangely calm, his voice dropping in register and becoming slow and velvetty; but the song was also about my mother who was suffering from vertigo and speech dissar-ray, it was like she was zooming around thru time, in and out of it, not able to direct her arrow anymore.
3. The bass on Traffic Jam is recorded live on a Yamaha DX100 keyboard/the sound is the preset used on Whigfield's Saturday Night - Solid Bass/a picture of the DX100 appears on the cover of Journey Inwards by LTJ Bukem, but in negative image so that white is black and black is white: the keys to complicate matters further are miniature sized as the DX100 is a smaller version of the classic DX7/programming it has been likened to 'decorating a house through the letterbox'/such decorating in our house was performed by an exceptionally talented young man who travelled to us from Victorian times/-he came with various strange, long, gothic tools and instruments which he poked through the letterbox into various parts of the flat, where they wobbled like metallic insects/he gave his name as Simon.
4. Once the X-26 was crack'd, and I took it to A1 Music in Manchester to fix, and while it was in, they lent me another machine which I used to record By the Volcano, i couldn't get the hang of it at one point, and there is a strange drop out which is unintentional on
(the song)
was a description of an experience i had on holiday in Italy, on a boat sailing in the naples bay in the early morning, still reeling from the death of my mother. It was a kind of redemption, a healing. lacrima cristi, the tears of christ, was a kind of wine they have down there.