Although the audience for what I do musically is TINY (what fun it is to represent a word meaning small with such gusto and emphasis), I do nevertheless get asked what I am up to from time to time and in particular “is there any new Spunkle stuff coming out/are you going to play live again?”.
My usual answer to both questions is usually “not really”. Spunkle was a project I dreamt up when I was a student in the late 90’s and the “newest” stuff that was ever completed was “Music For DXing”, specifically the bonus track on the CD release which was completed some time after the main collection of songs. That was all around 2003/4. The first releases were on the Shifty Disco Singles Club in 1997 and 1998 (Lubetune and Where Will You Be This Xmas?). There were lots of cassette tapes recorded afterwards, one-off minidiscs, Prepared Vinyl and hand-burnt CD-Rs, and then in 2008 I formed First Fold Records with some other chaps and we released The Autumn Tapes, Live and Music For DXing. I stopped working with First Fold last year [edit! Readers! First Fold seems to have folded of late, so most of the links above are out of date too…]
There is some unreleased music recorded when I was feeling like Spunkle between 1997 and 2003 left in my archives, and there have been various ideas for disseminating this (you can see a video for one track here for example), but it’s not “new” and I haven’t recorded anything with Spunkle in mind since the aforementioned Music For DXing.
As for playing live, well most of that is covered in the booklet that comes with the “Live” CD, and of course you all bought a copy of that didn’t you? 😉
So why, when I am creating new electronic music, is it not still Spunkle?
Well, I was asked recently why the Konstanzegraff music was called Konstanzegraff and not Spunkle, and the answer was along the lines of needing a name to reflect the type of music that I was making (there is a lot that has not been said about K-Graff that perhaps needs elucidating). Perhaps more importantly though for me it would feel more disingenuous to release everything I ever did electronically as Spunkle in the hope that it would attract more attention (based of course on my vast legacy and reputation :D), and I’ve been doing different stuff for a long time…
So for now I have loads of new names for releasing music. As well as Konstanzegraff there’s Deep Grass. I’ve even played live as Deep Grass, and this week the first Deep Grass stuff of 2013 has been released to the internet.
First up there’s my edit of Kill Murray’s “For The Kids” (currently smouldering away with EIGHT plays :D), and yesterday the world got to see LOAD “” which I put onto YouTube…
So if there’s anyone out there in the big wide world of the internet who is reading this and wondering “is there any new Spunkle stuff coming out/are you going to play live again?” the answers are…”not really, but maybe some old stuff will see the light of day…” and “NO!”, and then I’d follow up with “but watch out for Deep Grass and Konstanzegraff”…
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