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Music To Disperse Crowds

by Beam Weapons

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1.
Oubliette 07:55
2.

about

Pro-dubbed Swedish blue cassette tape with variant colour sleeves and inside-sleeve images, each one unique. Edition of 30.

Beam Weapons is, essentially, the noise I make late at night when I’m feeling slightly disconnected from the world. It may actually be the thing that tethers me to the planet and stops me drifting out of sight. Left to my own devices, I’d very quickly go feral. Time has no meaning for me, it’s a worthless currency. I like to lose my place. I’m happiest not knowing whether it is day or night, sleeping in a chair and having dinner for lunch and breakfast three times a day. I don’t like wearing trousers. I don’t like natural light inside. I never want to go to bed. That’s the sort of mood that makes for Beam Weapons music, a sort of discombobulated abandonment.

I’m not a musician or a technician, I’m a concept person, which is why everything is so scuzzy and lo fi and messy and doesn’t make any sense. I’m not even sorry. I am inspired by a million things, but this particular set of stuff was influenced by performance art and science fiction; by yoga and interpretive dance; by terrorism and torture; by Eliane Radigue and Panos Cosmatos, by the world continuing to slide inexorably into the gaping, glistening maw of the abyss.

Oubliette started as a twenty minute track, then ten, then slightly less to fit onto a tape. That’s okay. You can edit it pretty much anywhere, and it makes its point quite quickly, the rest is just earache. I wanted to make an experimental piece of music, but there’s not much chance of that at this stage as everything has been done. So I just concentrated on making something that was both blank and overloaded. There’s content, but there isn’t. It’s like ugly Muzak, which I’m fine with.

I’ve been interested in self-help recordings for many years, particularly those that are slightly aggressive or sinister, where gentle persuasion becomes borderline bullying. This tape is called ‘Music to Disperse Crowds’, after all, and 'Super Heavy Actualisation' track is how I would move people. Not by asking them nicely, not by telling them sternly, but by simultaneously comforting them and creeping them out. Marina Abramovic and Ulay provide the motivational voices.

Invasion of the Bee Girls is a pretty awful, absolutely brilliant film from 1973 that I can’t help but watch every few months. I was inspired to write a new theme and knew that it needed to be odd, muddled, fuzzy and murky, just like the source material. There’s a lot of futuristic noises that sound incredibly dated. Good. I’ve no idea what the film is about, really, apart from sex and death, but that’s enough, isn’t it? What else is there? What more do you want?

Thanks for listening.

Paul

credits

released May 5, 2019

Recorded in May and December 2018
Made by Paul Bareham

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Beam Weapons Doncaster, UK

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