This album has been made entirely from samples taken from the Midnight Crossroads Tape Recorder Blues album, which I made with Ralf Wehowsky for A Bruit Secret. Like that album it is a tribute to the spirit of the blues, viewed through a prism of 21st century cultural criticism. It evokes an earlier era when the relationship between a performer and a song arose out of a community, not a property relation. In appropriating my own material I have short-circuited the prevailing ethos of piracy and bricolage, and returned in a sense, to my self.
Despite being made in New Zealand, and using some recordings from the Rhineland, the two places that are really central to this album are the Mississippi Delta and the island of Jamaica. These tracks include samples of acetate surface noise derived from archival recordings courtesy of Sound Archives-Nga Taonga Korero.Tk. 2 originally released by Early Morning Records, Norway, on the 7” compilation ‘On the Road to Limited Edition’. Tk. 4 derived from original sitar improvisations played and recorded by Ralf Wehowsky. All recordings engineered by BR except parts of tk. 9, live Quicktime recordings by Vanessa Coxhead at the Physics Room. All other recordings played and recorded by BR – acoustic guitar and vocals. Analogue tape loops sampled in this album were previously used in the A Bruit Secret recording Midnight Crossroads Tape Recorder Blues by BR and Ralf Wehowsky. This album produced Nov 2005 – Mar 2006 in the Temple of Music Digital Annex. Originally released on CDR by w.m.o-r.”