The Time Being | Steve Kilbey

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ah 1991/92 rolls around
and g.a.f. had been a disappointment
and priest=aura had pretty much flopped
and i had a bad drug habit
john foy at redeye wasnt really interested anymore
but as a “favour” he said he’d put this record out
i’ll just release it he said
but nothing more….
this record was a 5 track ep
(another stupid e.p.?!)
i thought it had my best solo stuff to date
my my
a lot had changed
with some money i had made from starfish
i bought a 24 track machine and a nice mixing desk
and i kinda moved outta my home
and started living in this huge rundown house
in the salubrious inner sydney suburb of surry hills (ha ha)
me and pryce
you remember him from remindlessness
put the equipment in the downstairs lounge room
and eventually the other tenants in the house moved out
and some colourful local identities moved in
and we had it all going on there for a while
pryce was an excellent engineer and co-hort for a while
but eventually we had a falling out over drugs n money i guess
or acknowledgement or something
i was in a state of disarray for a while there
and i didnt always treat people nicely
but he was no saint either
eventually we parted company acrimoniously
and he even still has a nasty little go at me from time to time
but notwithstanding all that
he was a big help in helping me do much of this disc
so i’m living in this ratty huge 3 storey terrace house
i’m on the gear
ive walked out of my nice home in rozelle
and i start spending all my time recording
and i love what i’m starting to do
and no one else was in the studio except me n pryce
and a few mates who dropped over
mclennan
peter milton walsh
various luminaries in hi jinx
we record somna one night
everyone drifting off
wow! its a great new sound
exactly the kind of feeling i’m going for
hypnotic pleasurable sweet dreamy
you know …just like the stuff was
limbo was huge and epic
a great melody
sped up n re-sped up bass parts interlock like asian gamelans
it was exactly where i wanted to be
its like priests shadow self
sleep with me was pure romance i thought
with its pseudo classical chorus
fall in love …well whose story was that anyway?
space was chaos space was the unravels bolero
space was the sound of me surrendering to the stuff
the record came out n disappeared
i dont think it even got reviewed at the time
so low had my stock suddenly fallen
mind you a record called narcosis aint gonna be a crowdpleaser
but this record
with some of my best sounding stuff ever
went under without a trace
a while later a company called vicious sloth
re released it with some added tracks
that were done maybe within 2 years of the original 5
i guess the egyptian is a backing track i wrote for this canadian woman
who made an album at my studio during all of this
she thought it was too weird which i realized was a compliment
so i sang on it myself and its pretty good, isnt it…?
midnite in america is a sombre sad piece
linda wong i wrote on a zither…i wonder if sweet linda still graces
this mortal plane….
english kiss is a song i wrote for a girl i once met in a shop
she had a boyfriend
so i wrote this tho i never played to her or anybody else at the time
it is a total solo effort
which is strange in this period to see me engineering
because i’d lost track of how my studio worked (no pun intended)
then my brother john and i recorded double exposure n over
on his computer studio in the mid 2000s
at the end of over is a gap
then you hear me reading an extract from season in hell by rimbaud
it was from a long deleted project
so narcosis + is my favourite and in a way least successful record
it was way ahead of its time i really believe that
grunge had made me redundant etc
listen with fresh ears
theres some good stuff here….