Lighterthief – My Dream Sea
Out of all the nine tracks I produced for Ape last year this is my personal favourite.
It’s got this strange dark undercurrent going on- with monks chanting and a lot of dissonance-some people find it quite hard to listen to but it seems absolutely perfect to me—balanced-but just teetering on the edge of disaster.
I played it to someone once in headphones and they said it felt like their head was being pulled apart!! Someone else described it in a blog as sounding like “making filthy love in a railway arch, whilst on acid, in 1940s New York”. Which of course I was thrilled by.
When it was in its early days as a bunch of unconnected noises put together by me and Andy, I played it to some other singers to see if they were interested in contributing to it- the reaction was “no- its shit!!”.- hahah – But Jen took these completely random bits of music and glued them into something completely different. From then on it just needed organizing and arranging. I spent months lovingly tweaking and moving it about in a dark obsessive manner.
The video came about as I was messing about watching old cartoons and simultaneously listening to music. I slowed down a Little Audrey cartoon from 1949 to half speed and it’s as if it was made for it- quite spooky really.
It’s on the Hard Listening EP which of course everyone should buy.
Listen to the first colourful installment of a multi part series of chats between Andy Partridge and legendary producer John Leckie, or Sir John Johns and Swami Anand Nagara to give them their Dukes of Stratosphear nom de psyches.
Wizard musician and producer Stuart Rowe, ringmaster to a flying circus of musical contributors known as Lighterthief, has his first Digital EP Maximalism due for release on Ape on 16th March. 
