This was one of the last irr. tracks to begin its existence on the cassette 4-track. The beginning section (after the voice) is one of the earliest ‘studio’ recordings I made at the Felton Empire Studio: routing a microphone through a delay setting with a lot of regeneration and exploring the proximity interaction with an unusually chatty electrical outlet. The recitation at the beginning was an extract of something recorded by John Scharpen, which I’d found randomly attached to a cassette dub of some music he had given me; I don’t know what he was reading, but I liked the tone of it and thought it would make a good start for the piece. A squeaky Welsh train recorded on a squeaky Welsh train ride wanders in for added texture. What I had forgotten until I started this reconstruction was that some of the 4-track sources used were extracted from a pre-existing longer piece that I had labelled as ‘‘Patapheromone’, but that will be explained in the reissue notes for that release.

That strange electric bellowing that wanders in around the 2 minute mark is one of the few justifications I have for buying the ridiculous Roland GR-700 when I was 19. For those of you not familiar, the GR-700 was a mid-80s commercially-available guitar-controlled synthesizer, which took the notes played on an odd-shaped electric guitar and (if you were lucky) translated those pitches into a MIDI signal that would trigger sounds from a synthesizer footswitch bank. I was, and still am, a big Robert Fripp/King Crimson enthusiast, and an earlier version of this instrument figured into their 80s output so I leapt at the opportunity to buy one for myself. It proved to be a rather unreliable instrument, and the range of synthesizer sounds it could trigger were generally pretty awful; fortunately, I bought it right as that model had become obsolete and music stores were aggressively ‘remaindering’ the ones that were still lingering in their showrooms, so I got mine for less than $200. I’m not sure the three minutes on this recording (and the scattering of minutes on a few other recordings) was worth the $200 – but the ‘controller’ also served as my first electric guitar (albeit a particularly awkward and lopsided one) until I could afford to get a proper guitar in my late 20s. This GR700 is still occupying my closet. I have no idea if the synthesizer unit still works.

The ratcheting noises towards the end were generated in the same way as the electrical hum at the beginning, only an electric mosquito repeller instead of an electrical outlet was used as the audio source. This so-called ‘repeller’ was a plug-in device that generated a sound that was supposed to keep hungry mosquitos away, but was in fact 100% ineffective at doing anything of the kind. At least it provided me with an interesting source to use while I was relentlessly preyed upon by the little buggers.

The track name, which translates to “Immortality is Not Everybody’s Thing”, is a quote taken from Kurt Schwitters (who apparently took it from Goethe).