The Scratch.

I saw what I want.
I want what I see.
I see what I fancy.

I smell what I touch.
I touch what I fear.
I fear what I hear.

I hear what I want, 
but don’t want to catch
the sound of a scratch.

I scratch what I see.
When it doesn’t come to me,
but I’m always ready.

To make it always. 
To make it all worthy.
To make it all.
Make it all worthy.

- - - - - - 

The Scratch - credits.

Django Hendrickson: 
vocals and choral backing vox, piano, French horn keyboards, box and chair percussion. 
Marc Plastic Olivier: 
electric guitar, Moog oscillator, analog delay spin, backing vox and vacuum bass, programming.

Café D’Or lyrics: Django and Marc.
Holloway music: Marc and Django.

Production and recording: 
Marc Olivier at Plastic Sound Studios, London, 2013. 

From the forthcoming album “Unknown Sounds”.

Love: 
Uncle Marc, Mummy, Daddy, Elephant, The Black Sheep.

The Scratch -a cappella mix-  (Django and Marc Plastic)

This is a song recorded by our six-and-a-half year-old son, Django. 
It's inspired by the recent death of our friend Erick Legrand. Erick knew Django for years, they played together, bonding over stylish toy cars and music. When Erick left his apartment in Folkstone this winter, he came to stay with us for a while and Django was excited to spend some time with him. Erick was very ill however and his health declined markedly. Sadly their friendship didn't have the chance to blossom the way either of them wanted but they both felt the connection keenly. When Erick died last week Django was really heartbroken saying that he wished that they had had the chance to get to know each other better.

Django sat down at the piano this morning and recorded this piece right off the cuff using my iPhone.
He said: "This is a song for Erick because I miss him. It's just called "Bye Bye Erick". 
It's straight improv and, as such, it has its flaws, but it expresses his sense of sadness and loss perfectly. There's occasional buzz on the lower notes because my phone rested on the piano itself.

Bye Bye Erick

Sun Set

REPEAT - DELETE: “TDK ULTRA”.

Sound Is A Disease.

Repeat – Delete is the collision Marc Plastic and I make occasionally when we’re not making “other”. It void of maps or fence posts and claims no allegiance to anything. 

Recorded at Marc’s Plastic Studio last week. Completed in about two hours between working on last Prude shreds, possible Machine God ideas and a track for Plastic’s solo record (It will be utterly stellar. He’ll be in NYC in September to finish it off with Daniel Ray and some of the NY Dolls, the fucker.)

TDK ULTRA is an atavistic offshoot from the cancerous pus-filled sac of “Leichenschrei” via TG’s “Violencia (the bullet)”. There’s a semiotic semi-nod to Towers Open Fire and Break Through In Grey Room as well. It’s inspired by a piece I wrote that’s a textual collision of MK Ultra history and a treatise on Brian Eno’s pioneering use of tape loops in the early 1970’s. The texts side-by-side just naturally seemed to want to coalesce, blur themselves together into a re-imagined chimeric muscle-twinge that spreads to the cortex. 

We recorded the text four different ways, from shouting to intimate whispers. Marc then layered and tweaked them aggressively, panning some parts in utterly unpredictable ways. The resultant smear tasted succulent yet reached for more. We’d spent the morning listening to Mother Head Bug’s “Zambodia”, the genius creation of Dave Ouimet who started Cop Shoot Cop then went on to play with Foetus, Swans, Railroad Jerk and countless others. “Zambodia” is classic Lower East Side music from the late 80’s/90’s yet moves further afield than most of the bands they were associated with. They engulfed gypsy music long before it was post-MTV mass pop’d as hep courtesy of the comical Gogol-verse. They absorbed and mutated klezmer, rock, carnival music for the freak shows and children’s rhymes for young lepers. So, as I was standing in the bathroom with Ouimet’s demented creating cycling as smoke in my head, I heard someone in the yards outside using their phone. Old-style, the beeps of the numbers as they were keyed floating a tone and rhythm up to me through the open window. I scuttled insectile back into the studio mumbling some shit to Marc about the melody and rhythm from my fevered imagination and he did what he does so well which is to translate my bizarre creative wrestlings into flesh, strange and bruise-colored flesh. Thus reared the scratchy, gritty oscillating tone that slurs through the second half.

This excision may seem like a desultory and not cognate, but there’s so much material that urges for egress from us both, and so much that’s germane in some way or another, that it just feels necessary to uncork it.

......use sub-aural frequency blasts erase memory while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements simple patients repetitive statements simple repetitive.....

TDK ULTRA

This version of ‘Neurozone’ is an early cassette demo of tracks that emerged as we were writing Burn Out At The Hydrogen Bar. It’s from a collection of random cassette demos of varying quality I’ve unearthed and finally transferred to CD. I’m loosely calling it “Burnt Out (talkin’ shit and shootin’ smack)” ‘cause I’m such a fuckin’ intellectual and that’s really much more of what we ever did than actually write enough music to fill an album. 

Dylan was living in a ground floor apartment on 4th street sometime in the summer of ‘92 when we wrote this jagged little shard. The place was owned by a motorcycle freak whose real name I can’t remember for the life of me, but I used to call him Gear, so Gear he remains. Hidden behind a dented and grumpily resistant steel door that complained when opened, the joint was shockingly miniscule. Its size wasn’t helped by the fact that it was jacked full of strange heaps of machine parts, stacks of tires in corners and drums of oil against the back wall. Its two windows were perpetually curtained leaving the place cast in murky dark. We called it Dog Solitude in tribute. (We had an insane fabricated two-deck card game hybrid of poker, cheating and drinking we played in those days for which we applied the same sobriquet). Husks of motorcycles in different stages of either collapse or reanimation stood on blocks next to the hacked-short insult of a cigarette-burn halo’d couch in what was the main room, skeletal shapes casting skyline shadows across the greasy wooden floor boards. Dylan’s studio was his room, and his room was sweeping enough to accommodate bed and gear but nothing more. I spent a lot of time scrunched up beside the desk knotted in pensweatnotebookinkfever while D scribbled threads of 1’s and 0’s, the two of us passing headphones back and forth as the threads began to knit into something coherent. I dropped rough vocals standing on his bed and trying not to bounce....hehehe. The feel and sound of ‘Neurozone’ was very much infected and inflected by 4th street’s furiously active life. Originally a bay windowed room, the construction of Detox’s space meant that bed and studio essentially elbowed themselves out into the sidewalk, the world outside bleeding into it in a constant stream of street sounds, conversation shards excerpted through the window, sirens keening, radios blaring ballgames and gunshots barking in warm nights, an indecipherable omniverse pouring in in mangled, neon-sputtering spliced configurations. “There’s something moving on the other side, but what it is is not too clear”.

There will be more, but this is for now. This is for fallen friends and those who simply couldn’t go on any more, friends from then and friends from now, the ghosts who haunt my days, your days, our days. 
This is for Jamie Duffy and Craig Albertson and Bobby Ross and for Critter, just to start the list rolling.

Yes, you can download it.




Neurozone - demo

This is another cassette demo that I recently unearthed, saving it from decay. It's a ragged little shard of a track called 'Derailer' that's stripped down to bare bones. It was written down on the Lower East Side in mid-1991 in a dank basement apartment Detox lived in for a few months before he accidentally set it on fire almost burning the building down. The people that owned the apartment not-so-politely asked him to leave. Lucky he made it out without getting kneecapped. Seems like fire and collapse followed us all across the city during the writing of Burn Out, always flickering darkly at the frayed edges, often running up out of control behind the control panel when we weren't paying attention.

The track will form a part of the compilation of demos and out-takes called "Burnt Out (talkin' shit and shootin' smack)" that will hopefully appear in the not-too-distant future.
It features Detox on loop-hack and me on vox-hack. Although Steve "fly" Watson and Mark "fiendish" Kermanj were working with us at the time, these demos are almost all pre-guitar and drums. Yes, the sample at the start is for real and is excerpted from a phone message left on Detox's machine from a guy he knew. The whole message ran for over five minutes. I'll tell you the story some day if you don't already know it.

This track is another one that's available for download though the next few won't be. Yes, there are more to come while I decide what to do with the whole mess. Enjoy the drugged and drunken stumble down Memory Lane!

Derailer - demo

Straight To The Top at Junction Road Motor Company

I recorded this for use in a track being written by Sean Payne and Jason Novak. It was to be released at the Cold Waves memorial show, but I'm not sure if it ever got done. At least I never saw it. I'm pretty sure that this full piece would have been almost impossible to shoehorn in unless it was a major feature, but it wasn't meant to be a highlight. I just assumed that they'd judiciously cut'n'stutter it to pieces. 
I recorded it at 2:30 in the morning, outside, in the South of France with the bats flitting dagger-like just above my head, flitting tattered through the warm, black air.

..in the dark, at the end, shuttling 'cross our maps, shuffling through the wires and shards of shadow and flashes of blinding light, we search for connection, for love, for passion, for the thing unknown to us until we find it. I hope you find it, Jamie. I'm glad I knew you while I did.

For Jamie Duffy, in the dark, at the end.

‘But Never Quite Making It’ 
Django and Marc Plastic with some input from me. 
The music’s played mostly by Django with the occasional riff from Marc and some moans and static clicks from me and Plastic. They experimented with Marc’s recently repaired Moog Opus 3, Marc showing him different ways of creating sounds, various approaches to getting the best noises from the Moog. They played and recorded and built up dynamic layers until they had the basis of the sound piece, Marc masterfully snipping and clipping, arranging and modulating, massaging and effecting each of the strands until he’d woven a distinctly disturbing piece. Django was utterly absorbed by the whole process if a little speechless at the complexity and sheer scale of what’s possible. We were thinking that it’d be cool to have D sing on it, but he wasn’t convinced deciding instead that he’d like to recite a poem he’d written about a month ago inspired by the book he was reading called ‘Varjak Paw’. He remembered most of it but we had to improvise the second verse a touch. His delivery’s just stunning, patient and dynamic. Overall a killer post-Halloween piece.


But Never Quite Making It

“Electronically Yours” by Too Much Information.
T.M.I. was/is an on-again off-again project. The music’s written by Mike Bazini of Dystopia 1 and Howard Wulkan of Croc Shop. The track was recorded by Baz at Martin Bisi’s BC Studios, Brooklyn, NY in 2010. I recorded my vocals under the divine oversight of Marc Plastic at Plastic Studios in the Old Smoke and they were further fried by Baz chez BC. It’s a little shred of tube-yellow fiber-o light cast thru the smoky dim of ruined radio halls. Renegade virtuals with identi-skin faces dance a slow tattoo across the dusty floor, soot and grit mixing gently with graphene in the servo-housings of their naked, linking bodies. Hopefully there will be more, more or less.


Electronically Yours

Pulse (finger off) is what eventually became ‘White Room Black Eye’, one of my favorite tracks off of the 2004 Chemlab album “Oxidizer”. 

I’m posting this version naked, with all its imperfections because there’s something glorious about its frayed figure. 

The other reason that I’m posting it is because, as autumnal shadows start to elongate and nights close in I’ve been thinking about Jamie a lot. This isn’t the album version, it’s pre-, it’s demo, early, fractured and slewed off course. I adore it because it’s raw and unvarnished for mass unpopular consumption. Jason’s programming snarls rabidly, its sexual propulsion unfiltered. My vocals are ugly, burred at the edges (my natural two-packs-of-smokes-and-a-bottle-of-whiskey-a-day distortion shining through in all its fucked unglory). In the outro “down”s you can actually hear shreds of F.J.s backing vocals beckoning down the hole. 

But, the thing that really blows me away, that utterly knocks my lights right out is Slo-Hand's’s unhinged guitar. Like some static drenched cyclone of sonic white light it hustles and torques underneath the song until about 2:19. From that point onwards it breaks its cage, howling straight through the mix to rocket launch a fist into the frontal lobe. It’s scorched earth, it’s canisters of napalm tumbling out of the sky, it’s urban center dirty bomb detonation. 

Funny thing (or not): when I posted this link I was trying to remember exactly who had played this riff. For a long time I was sure that it was Greg Slo-Hand Lucas, but in the folds of time I got must have got lost (as Peter Wolf said) and this guitar madness became Jamie's horns and gown instead somehow. I posted it with the credit going to Jamie and, sensibly, Lucas wrote to me and said that although he loved Jamie's guitar playing as much as the next guy, that slice of searing genius was his, thank you very much while you're up. 

So, kids, as much as the drug-addicted life style of the purported "rock star" may have its shiny attraction and dissolute appeal, the reality is standing right before you. I went stumbling headlong into total addiction not by mistake or chance intervention, but by clear and definite choice. I saw Iggy crash and Keith burn out and I thought that was the most fascinating part of the package: the hampered, damaged, limping lifestyle of waste behind mirrorshades. I learned all the wrong lessons from the right guys and blindly, laughingly drove a truck loaded with pills and powders and syringes and bottles and smoking reefers straight through the heart of my career, my band, my record label, many of my friendships and my first marriage and into sheer wipe out, and it wasn't pretty. No, not at all. Though I've been clean of everything for over a decade, my memory has suffered countless direct hits and the long-term damage is immeasurable...except in clearcut cases like this. 

Greg Lucas, I apologize. This riff's for you. It's a fucking standard of destruction I return to again and again and again.

Sadly, the final version didn’t retain all of that slingshot madness, that nasty and unholy magic. Maybe that's because Greg was just too spicy to remain in the mix unvarnished, unfiltered, unafraid.
Or maybe I just can't remember the reason why...

Pulse (finger off) - White Room Black Eye demo

One of my favorite remixes of Binary Nation from OXO. 
It was done by a cat named Latin Saint whose sounds you can still find hustling his scene on myspace. He was the runner-up in an acidplanet remix competition. The acidplanet guys thought that this was an excellent remix but that acidplanet would be better represented by the other group that finally won. Over the years I've come to regret letting the decision be made by others instead of imposing my opinion on them. This is the remix that should have won out hands down, in all its digitally ragged punk rock glory. 
So, I toss it out here for your delectation.

Binary - LatinSaint Style -

This song is about me leaving Lewes New School (my old school).
I loved my old school, I had fun at my old school and had lots of friends there but my brain needed more feeding, so I went to a new school named Southover. I wrote this song because it was so hard to leave all of my friends and a familiar, comfortable place that I had known for years.  
-Django


Goodbye Lewes New School - Django

music by Marc Plastic and Django Hendrickson.
lyrics by Django Hendrickson and Maja Hendrickson.
main vocals, acoustic guitar, box drums: Django
electric guitar, keys, whisper vocals and soothing chick vox: Plastic
percussion: Elephant
arrangement, engineering, production and stealth: Plastic
recorded and conceived at plastic sound studios, london, 2013, baby.
from the forthcoming album "Unknown Sound".

Chemlab

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