The official Cardiacs Soundcloud Page. 

Brought to you by the unfaltering grace of the ALPHABET BUSINESS CONCERN

Some of these here tunes on this Soundcloud aren't necessarily "typical" of Crayola Lectern's oeuvre, but recent additions do include some of the more approved "proper" recordings. I'll leave you to decide which are improvisations, hastily recorded home demos or opportunistic moments which happen to have been captured in studios. The quality control on this site is not indicative of the more anal approach to making the killer records that you will come to love from Crayola Lectern. 

Quad Band, Lobster Band
The Teeth Are:
Lucas Lee - Vocals, Rhythm Guitar
Vincent Malloch - Bass
Milo Willicombe - Drums
Phoenix Moss - Lead Guitar, Art

Stars In Battledress is a British duo. Brothers Richard and James Larcombe write and perform delicate, otherworldly songs for harmony voices, piano and electric guitar. They've performed and recorded together and individually with William D Drake and the North Sea Radio Orchestra, but they began creating music together in childhood, ploughing an isolated furrow with hundreds of private cassette recordings. Initially they created collages from classical, folk and film and television music, crudely re-edited, reversed or slowed down, then learnt to perform and re-record the results, adding vocals and removing recognisable elements of the sources. In their twenties they rediscovered these "songs" and began to write new material in the style of what they heard. "In Droplet Form" is the second collection of this material.

The music of Stars In Battledress is uniquely English but never whimsical, poetic but never pretentious, defiantly unusual but never contrived, complex but never flash, trippy and dreamlike but with hardly a whiff of the sixties. Contradictions all, but in their precise, delicate music everything is where it should be. There are hints of Erik Satie, Syd Barrett, The Incredible String Band, Cardiacs and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but their style is truly theirs alone. There's something lonely and distant about it, but there's warmth and charm in their fragile world, and a gentle humour in the lyrics.

Despite the small forces this is a very varied album. "Hollywood Says So" is a lively acoustic stompalong, and "Hunt The Button" piles layers of hurdy-gurdy and tape hiss into a haunting farewell to cassette. The Larcombes even "rock" on TKS2, with unison voices hovering over a blaze of looped distortion which evokes something of their surprising forcefulness as a live act. From the fluttery delay and stretched vowels of "A Winning Decree" to the ghostly chimes of "The Women From The Ministry", the album gives off the musty air of a cobwebbed music room, and listening to it is like pressing a puzzled ear to the wall.

Bursting with beaming up beat power pop, grinding grunge and dramatic changes of mood. Ham Legion's compact mini-epics dive through all this into sudden passages of twisting, complex prog back to the Englishness of 60s pop, punk and new wave, then to occasional moments of restrained delivery and somber reflection. A bizarre but compelling mish-mash of styles and influences in bite sized chunks.

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