planet telex

The TOLLS community in Adelaide had big plans, we were going to take over the world, we were going to launch the next wave of electronic music composers into the world and slowly take it over… Ok, that’s probably not all true.

We put together a submission for funds from the Uniting Church for a computer to help compose music for the LLS, together with Prospect Uniting and a few budding musicians we set up a small electronic music studio in the basement of the Prospect Uniting Church hall, the basement had hosted a number of ministries in the past, in my younger years it hosted the Presbytery Youth Worker’s office and we referred to it as the dungeon, a name that suited it very well.

The dungeon hosted the music studio for a few years, it was never a pretty set up, a computer, a vinyl player, an old keyboard, people’s instruments and a handful of dedicated people who kept the thing ticking over by playing lots, creating, exploring, learning. A mate of mine Steve Pederson basically kept on patching the computer together with duct tape, computers were going out of fashion very quickly back then, so a computer that cost a packet one week was now being out done and out powered a month or two later.

Ped, John Roffe, David Turley and a handful of others would hang in the dungeon playing and creating, they’ve all moved on now… David is now in the UK with his wife Eden, they’re musicians and models, recently they were in a group titled ATLAS who released a ltd ed vinyl single (I have 2 copies) and now they are playing and recording under the name Lovers Electric, their website has a few mp3’s to download and the stuff is simply fantastic. Ped’s in a band in Adelaide, Junior are a phenomenal group of acoustic pop-rockers with a unique ability to tell stories and find hooks that just make you move, actually I think the old bucket of bolts that used to be the studio’s computer actually was used in recording Junior’s new cd “Time In The Sun.” I think that Jon is now lecturing in philosophy, I think he’s in Tasmania now and I assume he’s still expressing himself musically as well…

Over the time that the music studio was alive and well a number of tracks were put together and used in worship, I used to jump with joy when I’d play one of their tracks. I’ve got 2 cds of tracks put together by the crew, a couple of the tracks are remixes, including vocals by Bono but many are great electro-ambient-moody-melodic tracks that I’ve used in alt-worship services for quite some time.

I had a small conversation with Dave the other day via email and he said it would be ok for me to release a number of the tracks here as a part of the TOLLS archive, I didn’t ever release them on the TOLLS site, so this is particularly cool. The two cds that I have are titled “The Concrete Sea” and, the other wasn’t titled, but the cover that Geoff Boyce made for my cd has the words “We Will Refund The Difference” on it, so that’s what I’ve been calling it for the last 5 years…

The plan is that from tomorrow I’ll be uploading and making available the songs as mp3s compressed at 96kbps, after a while, or if the downloads make the server here die I’ll move them over to the dig tree site to be stored…

All up I’ll be releasing 14 tracks, probably one every 3 days to give the server some relief, so feel free to download the tracks and add them to your ipod, and if you do end up using any of them in worship let me know…

Tracklist:

01. Strings and Piano (8.40mins 5.96MB)
02. Chanting (6.45mins 4.64MB)
03. Motion (4.06mins)
04. Onion Fields (4.36mins)
05. Double Bass Lullaby (3.50mins)
06. LLS Garage (2.54mins)
07. LLS Garage II (4.56mins)
08. My Creative Comforts (9.13mins)