the cacophony of light - bits (2005)

 

Carousel came about after hearing Autechre and Four Tet for the first time. What struck me about their music was not that it was IDM, but that it was dark and in some ways menacing and that in some respects was what I was striving for with the cacophony of light. However, rather than go lock myself in the attic and produce my version of dark IDM I wanted to infuse the feeling I got when first hearing it into my own 'brand' of music. The theme of fairgrounds and circuses seemed natural choice for this album, inspired in part by the artwork of Dave McKean (for Neil Gaiman's The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch and the comic book for Alice Cooper's Last Temptation), the track "Circus of Death" by the early incarnation of The Human League, Carousel, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that features "You'll Never Walk Alone" and by Stephen Sondheim's "Send In The Clowns". The main inspiration came from a doctored photograph of demonic/vampiric carousel horse I produced for a spoof website of a black metal band called Warriors of Doom. The title of the track 'Into The Pantomime' was also borrowed from the WoD website, being a parody of "Into the Pandemonium" by Celtic Frost, not that this version is a black metal parody - far from it, I just liked the title (not that I think myself above such parodies, my first album contains a BM parody track called "The Penultimate Battle Triumphant As The Immortal Emperor Entombed In The Woods Of The Carpathean Forest Creates Necrophobic Mayhem At The Gates Of Marduk's Darkthrone And Nevermore Shall Thorns Rest On Thorns I Lay Against Borknagar’s Green Carnation Until We See The Anathema That Is Hecate Enthroned With My Dying Bride At Bal Sagoth’s Ancient Ceremony And The Infantile Hordes Are Nested In Their Cradle Of Filth (Part 1)"  - it is precisely 13 seconds long, but that's for another day).

 

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Into The Pantomime Panicking Pachyderm Send Home The Clowns Hippodrone Caroustabout

5:43 5:04 5:36 4:26 21:39

Download: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DEOUW9P7 50Mb (includes all artwork)

 

 

 

Moments on MediaFire: http://www.mediafire.com/?7dk9h1b18540ok8 

 

I make my own .pdf files and upload them rather than let them convert my Word documents - that gives me more control over formatting and layout since not all pdf writers convert Word docs the same - I use CutePDF - it's freeware and  works really well.

 

I don't have colour images in my books so I don't know what the quality is like - B/W images are a little grainy in a B/W book. My first book (Darqlands) was originally a full-colour webnovel with over 200 images - I reduced that to about 20 monochrome images for the final book. Full colour books are stupidly expensive - for example on Createspace a 200 page 5x8 full-colour book is $25.75 while the black'n'white version is only $5.50, and you cannot mix full-colour pages in a B/W book, so if only 1 page is colour, the other 199 pages are costed as colour too. Full colour is best for low page-count large format books - for example 50 pages @ 8x10 would be $7.75 (don't forget to add on about $7 per book shipping with Createspace).

 

The covers are full-colour regardless - and as they are CMYK print and not RGB they need gamma correcting to get the colour exactly right - I didn't bother so my royal-blue covers have a slight purple tint to them, but I quite like that.

 

 

ps: with Createspace you can skip the Proof copy stage if you want, but I wouldn't recommend it - it's surprising how many mistakes you spot in the first print copy that you never saw on the PC monitor.