This was a tricky one to put together the first time around. I was perhaps too attached to the principal source material, which was an especially silly, unplanned ‘non-performance’-style action that I did in 1998 with the help of a friend’s daughter at her 4th birthday party. The recording quality wasn’t all that spectacular, and there wasn’t a lot I could do to improve that back in the late 90s. A recording of fitfully expiring fluorescent bulbs and random mandolin abuse were added to accentuate the childish chaos. I’ve made some fairly substantial adjustments this time in an effort to finally get it in the neighbourhood of where I’d originally wanted it to be.

‘Claires Bêtes Nouvelles’ is another track that uses an extract from the sampler material created in the De Anza studio: specifically, a section from a long piece called ‘The Unconscious Passenger’. In the original 2001 version of ‘Radiant’ (and, correspondingly, in the actual 1992 ‘Passenger’ track), the extract is much longer and includes layers of a looped guitar sample appropriated from an external source that shall remain unnamed; I was always concerned that the sample was too recognisable, so in the 2005 revision I replaced that section with a new recording where I played a the guitar patterns myself.

The 2001 and 2005 versions both ended with a long, quiet location recording of a homeless man muttering to himself in the lot behind my picture-framing job sometime in mid-1999. I’ve now added the even longer, full-length version of that recording, but have isolated it as its own track for those who would prefer to leave it out.

The track name, which translates as ”Bright New Beasts”, is a quote from the poem ‘Le Brasier’ by Guillaume Apollinaire.