Chinstrap are delighted to present "Babble Off", 11 nuggets of gold from the vaults of the marvellous gentleman who goes by the name of Dwoogie, made between 2000-2003. It is an album for an extremely decadent electronic party at the apocalypse. Frantic rhythms and a reservoir of textures fly about like pinballs, competing for space with unforgettable melodic hooks, revealing a wild clatter of twenty-thousand stocks of kitchenware thrown down a vast staircase into a digital abyss from which delicious popgasmic flowers bloom.
This release comes with artwork designed by another prime slice of gent, the great Oblivian Substanshall.
And direct from Kraków via Dwoogie mail come the following safety announcements...
1. Bloo. The title came from bluegrass, as I wanted to make as stupid a bluegrass piece as I could. Reckon it worked, personally.
2. Bieszczady. A region of Poland in the very southeastern corner. The oldest people who live there have been inhabitants of 5 countries during their lifetimes without moving house. The area was depopulated of its local minority inhabitants in a murderous campaign by the Polish authorities. It’s still mostly empty. I like it.
3. Fox On The Run. Play on words. The original “Fox On The Run” was by The Sweet, of course. But that’s irrelevant. The voice you hear on the track is Polish newsreader and now editor of Polish Newsweek, Tomasz Lis. Lis is the Polish word for “fox”. In the extracts you hear, Lis is cursing like a soldier, on mic, about how fucking shit a particular news item is. “Kurwa” is the Polish equivalent of “fuck”. It appears frequently on this track.
4. Last Train to Bemblow. “Bemblow” is a very poor transliteration of Polish “Bębło”, which is a village outside Kraków. My ex used to work there. It hasn’t got a rail link, but the track sounds trainy, so there you are.
5. Diana’s Chauffeur. An aural representation of what driving into a tunnel at 100mph might sound like.
6. Touch. Just a silly piece of scrap. No idea where the “Can I touch it?” sample came from.
7. The Last Snowman. This was written around one Christmas, when I sent it to members of my family as a present. The title is designed to mislead. It has nothing to do with winter. It’s a direct translation of the Polish epithet “ostatni bałwan”, which means something like “total idiot”. This may change your view of the song. It may not. Who cares anyway?
8. Soukup in Babylon. Named after a crazy Czech bus driver I came across outside Plzeń – one Pavel Soukup. We were staying at a campsite called, for reasons unknown, Babylon. That’s the title of the track. “Babble Off” is also a reference to this stay.
9. United State. At the time this track was being written I was working on a grammatical analysis of a foreigner learner’s English. In certain contexts, they said “United State” rather than “United States”. It was my job to find out what those contexts were. An interesting task, surprisingly enough. Unlike this note.
10. Mood. I found an online version of Frank Herbert reading “Dune”. A book I enjoyed very much as a teenager. The section I used for the recording is about Paul Atreides being trained by his weapons master Gurney Halleck. “Mood” is not important in this context.
11. Smackin’. Who doesn’t like “Smoke On The Water”? Well, me, for one, so I did a version with the stupidest sounding synths I could find. Incidentally the increasingly loud drone in the first section is a sample of King Crimson’s “Elephant Talk” slowed down and played backwards.
