Lightarmour Editions

OUT OF THE DARKNESS CAME MORE DARKNESS, UNTIL IT WAS HAMMERED INTO LIGHT

This is the Cover Art for upcoming Fate Razor remix - BlackGuard Wolfpack (Tétaz Dub). It is a retro-snapshot of a headspace, a time, and an out-of-body experience and associated death that changed my entire paradigm. The BlackGuard songs come from the early ‘Melbourne’ era of Fate Razor - a portal of experience that was one of the darkest periods of my life and simultaneously one of the most creatively fruitful. There were many unforgettable characters I encountered in Melbourne; characters such as JeepMaster Warren the psychedelics merriment-maker, and Alt-Rocker Brett in his knee-high wellington boots and the pet python he kept in his lounge room (was not too keen, but harmless - the real problem was the snakes I encountered on my return to Perth…).

During my stay in East St Kilda I also met David Thrussell (of Snog, Soma, and Black Lung infamy) - in turn he introduced me to rising Producer & Mastering Engineer François Tétaz. Franc was a member of Industrial / Experimental / Ambient project Shinjuku Thief and would go onto re/master releases such as Merzbow’s Merzbox CD box set & The Triffids’ seminal album Born Sandy Devotional.

Fortunately François agreed to master what was to be the 1st Fate Razor release, a 7-Track CD.

I had received an unexpected letter from Chicago’s Wax Tax records requesting a follow up demo as they liked the tracks I’d sent months earlier; I was excited obviously and some of the songs on the 7-track were part of a 2nd demo intended to nail the prospect. What happened during and after the mastering/mixing sessions would take a novel to describe, but to summarise - my Father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I spent months torturing myself over whether to return to Perth or selfishly pursue the potential record deal (at least in the short term), one night in North Carlton had my first vivid out-of-body experience in which I watched Fate / Death (represented as a pack of merciless wolves) dragging my father from his house by the throat and realised it was all going down quickly, wrote BlackGuard Wolfpack as a cathartic coping mechanism, returned to Perth to be with my Father at his death, never got to respond to Wax Trax, and in a desperate & broken plight for answers ended up on the radar of a coven of serpentine/occult/religious delusions and practitioners (another novel, another day)…

Amidst the storm, Franc delivered a Dub-ish remix of BlackGuard Wolfpack which blew me away - it was finally released on Bandcamp in 2018, and remastered again for the upcoming Spotify / Streaming release (goes live on the 17th June). The remix is a fresh soundtrack-ish abstraction of the original, but the original version is the one that captures something of the weight and atmosphere of the circumstances that informed it. Strangely enough, later in 2006 François went on to win an award for Feature Film Score of the Year - for the Australian Horror film “Wolf Creek”; There are so many synchronicities in the arc of this story, It’s a metaphysic mathematician’s dream.

It took more than a decade to grasp the central realisations of what I experienced and perceived in that most vivid and traumatic out-of-body. In the years that followed I was to encounter and confirm those startling paradigms again and again in my travels to the deserts in Australia (Uluru) and Turkey (Cappadocia was a haunting experience), across Europe and in the Andes mountains crossing Chile and Argentina. It is the foundational stuff and back-story of the Fate Razor project, and its evolution into the upcoming new albums and EPs currently in progress. For those that resonate with the thread in the words, images, and music, I hope you follow the story as it takes the form it was always intended to.

PS the new releases feature two covers (1st covers for Fate Razor) - The Order of Death by PIL, and Sunshine Felt The Darkness Smile by DAX RIGGS. Stay sane in the membrane.

LE42 - In Lightarmour We Trust

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Fate Razor Playlist now on Spotify...
https://open.spotify.com/track/7afTHKHrcqxGxnyX0aZNUE?context=spotify:playlist:1Ow800Kp3TGubjJyZ72QMo&si=8477145931143457

LIGHTARMOUR EDITIONS MOMENTS #6 - Modern English & The Forever Hope

Recently I attended a live performance of Modern English and it was an amazing real-world time-travel experience. The glittering spire of their quintessential Post-Punk Future-Pop still conveys a sense of some amorphous, romantic, modernist promise; the emotional hit is as vivid as it was on first listen to 1982’s brilliant “After The Snow” album. Everyone knows their “I Melt With You” New Wave anthem, a complete and perfect tune that captured the moment definitively - with its generational catchphrase ‘The Future’s Open Wide’ - and to this day it continues to hold it, crystallised in time.

The gig reminded me also of the mystical allure and off-the-scale ‘cool’ of that early 4AD era. 4AD was a delicious secret amongst the underground subcultures. It was Post-Punk intelligentsia; one of the most seminal of all the seminal record labels. In 1992 I had back-packed around Europe with a stash of my own 12” pressings, visiting a Hitlist of influential labels in pursuit of that elusive record deal (Contempo in Italy, Play It Again Sam in Belgium etc). In England, on the way to Mute Records, I took a detour to the 4AD Earl's Court office and sat in a pub across the road to chill out a bit and savour the moment. Of course secretly I was also hoping that maybe members of The Wolfgang Press or Cocteau Twins might just pop in for a drink and a chat…

Modern English were one of the more brightly-coloured feathers in 4AD’s cap, and finally seeing them live (their first time to Australia if I heard vocalist Robbie correctly) was to witness that they still embody the spirit that moved so many people from the outset. By the way, first track was Sixteen Days - one of the classics from their rawer post-punk era (links below). Those fine English modernist dandies whipped up a no-bullsh*t angular-yet-melodic rite of rejuvenation, and I’m grateful that by the end of the night I walked out into the calm night air stripped of the dust that time had gathered.

In Lightarmour We Trust

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Raw Post-Punk Set from John Peel Show
https://youtu.be/ezDbSQC1T1g?si=7GsjpzucIihKVEC-

Sparkling Lushness Circa 1982
https://youtu.be/5pdoOF7537A?si=TWz9lswDYw0DQpAL

Here’s a code for 30% OFF ALL VINYL & DIGITAL releases on Lightarmour - New Wave / Industrial / Dark Ambient IDM / Doom Metal / Neo-Classical Drone / EBM / Post-Industrial Soul / IDM BreakCore / Power Noise / Techno Noir…etc…sale runs until Sunday the 6th (Midnight UTC).

Code: friday30wam
Link: https://lightarmoureditions.bandcamp.com

In Lightarmour We Trust

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