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Dead Rat Orchestra
Matadero

Single UK 2010 on Champion Version label
World

Sleeve states: Recorded 8th July 2007 at MATADERO, Madrid although record company notes state the recording was made on July 5th Side A Plays Outside In Side B Plays Inside Out Total Duration 18.36 Release Notes from Label: We’re very happy to announce our first 10″ release, ‘Matadero’ by Dead Rat Orchestra. In 2007 the band were invited to participate in the Miradores Festival in Madrid. They spent a week long residency within the Matadero, the former municipal abattoir, a collection of grand and empty halls and spaces, some redeveloped, some not. All now reconstituted as city art and opera spaces. This record is culled from the performance they gave on 5 July 2007, responses to the space that they found themselves in, it’s physicality and it’s history, it’s resonances. Starting out with room-tone singing, a late-night Alvin Lucier inspired experiment, the room having fed back on itself again and again through re-recording, suggesting a melody, or melodies. Gradually the band broke from that, pressing on with driving harmonium chords and the clatter of a week’s worth of debris, pushing to break free, but always held. The room tone stays on, a light bell strikes constant. That’s the A side done. The band strung up huge nylon strings across the space, pulled them tight around themselves and found notes that worked for the room or spoke of other things. They contact miked them. Side B is a continuation of the A, cut as things drop away and others grow. The band started pulling on the long strings, bowing them, plucking them, twitching. Gradually this forms into a driving swirl of fiddle and long-strings played with clothes pegs, lush drones created from record players revolving against them and all underpinned by understated box-drum and thunderous bass grunts. It all breaks down. An orchestral psych-out.

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