Opthalmologist Frogspawn

After far too long 'in the pipeline', the compilation Opthalmologist Frogspawn I've been piecing together from the earliest Children of the Drone recordings is finally done. These date back to 2002 when we were still using a low-quality mono microphone, and capture the early Drone sound, when it was mostly just me, Keith and Simon. It also features parts of our first proper public performance (if you don't count playing for Ben Bradshaw in the Exeter Cathedral chapterhouse!) which was at The Bowling Green on the Spring equinox that year, when Matthew S and Philip joined us.

Listen Here
I've attempted some more ambitious splices than anything I've done before. The idea was to 'sonically meld' pieces from different times and places by crossfading in combination with various types of flanging and phasing. The idea (and Melski immediately leapt to the same analogy when I started to describe it to her yesterday) is to create the sonic equivalent of the familiar TV/film visual effect used to indicate a transition into a 'memory' or 'dream' sequence, where the screen goes all wavy. Some examples are more successful than others, but I'm sure I'll get better at this sort of thing with practice.

The title refers to the title of the first track, recorded at The Bowling Green, where I used a dictionary to 'improvise' titles, opening it randomly, skipping about, stringing words together. For the rest of the titles, I've used the common names of various species of moths found in the British Isles (moths do have some excellent names).

Having finally dealt with this material, I can now get on with compiling some of the more recent (and perhaps more musically worthy) Dronings.