The first-time vinyl reissue of the sole album from UK DIY legends Milk
From Cheltenham, originally released in 1983 on famed It's War Boys imprint,
is recommended for fans of Swell Maps, The Faust Tapes and LAFMS.
"Flashback to no-when (1978) in a musty cellar beneath a record store in
Brixton, later to become the humble 8-track recording studio of It's War Boys.
Milk From Cheltenham would regularly jam and invite friends / enemies to
participate with whatever weapons / instruments they chose to deploy, making
live recordings on an odd triple microphone input cassette player. By the
time of the recordings at Surrey Sound in 1981-82, we had reduced in size
from a hive of toxicity to a triptych of poisoners: Victorr Lounge, Salamander
and myself.
"Like rabid quantum monkeys with broken typewriters, we were allowed
to run loose in the studio, under the supervision of tonmeister Chris Grey
and head zookeeper L. Voag. There was always a cornucopia of exotic instruments
including kettle drums, synthesizers and electric sitar. To make
some of the basement tapes sound bigger, Chris would play them through
vast speakers and re-record the results. The footsteps you hear is our mate
strolling around in cowboy boots on top of one of the speakers.
"Milk were hot-like a triplet mega-brain generously juiced on creative
steroids-and this was before our special splice-and-be-damned bricolage of
the tapes, interpolating into the jams a pastiche of Morricone lock grooves,
early Sparks, radio fragments, a JFK speech and samples from our most cherished
record, Christmas Carols With Breezy (a creepy singing rabbit). One
track mined a session at Cold Storage (home studio of This Heat) where everyone
played in different parts of the building, separated according to instruments
and without much idea of what anyone else would be doing.
"I remember scrawling a dead cow on a napkin in a caf . The albums, all
printed by hand, took longer to make than the recording because the screens
would often disintegrate. The back cover art was printed at Recommended
Records and spray glued-poor ozone layer! Almost half the song titles were
borrowed from Le Corbusier's book The Radiant City. The record was released
to spectacular indifference and just 500 copies made their way into an
unsuspecting world."
