Production Unit – The Illusion Of Talent

New mix to enjoy from Production Unit: it's wrapped in mystery and tentacles for Broken20, the digital download label from TVO which specialises in "releases concerned with decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz".


Production Unit – The Illusion Of Talent

liner notes found abandoned next to a half-burnt cd-r

“…he used to be fun, Production Unit – always dropping tunes at parties, a girl on each arm, splicing acapellas with breaks and kickdrums, happy and carefree. Then in the last few months he’d changed. It all started when he found that battered, oddly stained white label 12″, stamped only with an esoteric looking symbol and the single word ‘CTULU’ etched in the run out groove.
 
After that things changed. he began listening to the record obsessively. To my ears it sounded like the murky roar of an underground river, but he claimed that repeated listens began to elicit a coded message inside. Soon he started to collect others – some I’d heard of but others came in bizarre packaging and torn, briny-smelling boxes, shellac 78s with ‘property of Miskatonic U’ on them, records with titles like ‘Nautical Nuba’, ‘Dagon’s Bells’, ‘The Starry Wisdom’, ‘Sighting in The Abyss’, ‘Glaaki/Mi-go’.

With time he became even more furtive in his habits, endlessly scrawling in a series of notebooks, diagrams of strange geometric shapes with angles that somehow seemed blasphemies against nature.
 
Tonight he invited me round to hear, he claimed, the full unveiling of the coded messages in the records. Arriving late, i noticed immediately that his turntables were set up in an odd arrangement, with two trapezoid shapes suspended above them. Offering me a drink, he immediately set to work on them. the light in the room flickered and danced with the crystal shapes, and he frenziedly began cutting from record to record, adding a snatch of noise here, a fragment of voice there.
 
Soon the sounds became aligned together, but in a horrible decayed slow morass of writhing soundwaves, as the world began to slow down to a crawl.
 
Im scribbling these notes down on the back of a discarded Dom and Roland 12″ sleeve, and before the shadows i can see on the edge of time break through I will throw these words to the street, so that other may be warned. the acapellas are starting now….the shapes, the tentacles…THEY ARE THROUGH, DEAR HEAVENS! IA IA, CTHULU FTAGHN……”

(fragment ends)

*(with apologies to HPL)

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