23 SKIDOO
LTM/Boutique Catalogue



THE CULLING IS COMING (BOUCD 6604) £10
First released on vinyl only by Crepuscule's Operation Twilight arm in February 1983, The Culling is Coming flagged two radical new directions for Skidoo following their funky indie chart-topper Seven Songs the previous year. Drawn from two live performances, Culling combined a collaboration with the Balinese Gamelan Orchestra recorded at Dartington College of Music in October 1982, together with extracts from a more extreme, improvised set at the first Womad festival in July 1982, using scrap metal and tape loops. Both sides of the album were exactly 23 minutes long, and side one signed off (or rather didn't) with a stylus-hostile lock groove. Long deleted, this, challenging misunderstood album was light years ahead of its time. Now digitally remastered for release on The Boutique Label, it has been expanded by the inclusion of a complete (and equally extreme) 26 minute loop performance at Tielt, Belgium, on 8 October 1982. Recorded as part of Crepuscule's short Move Back/Bite Harder tour with Cabaret Voltaire, Tuxedomoon and Pale Fountains, this material has never before been released. The extended CD runs for 76 minutes. The booklet features the original artwork and contextual notes by Skidoo's Alex Turnbull. Full tracklist: G-2 Contemplation, S-Matrix, G-3 Insemination, Shrine, Mahakala, Banishing, Invocation, Flashing, Stifling, Healing (For the Strong), Move Back/Bite Harder.

Reviews: "A damn fine piece of work, the perfect non-chemical cure for a headache" (The Wire, 11/03); "A genuinely esoteric and intriguing reissue. The ambience remains one of menace rather than ethno-tourism" (Record Collector, 12/03); "The mixes are diamond sharp. The Gamelan music drifts serenely across great canyons of nothingness, fairybell tinkling and enormous booming which disregards all forms of rhythm, ideas elongated into an immense drip-feed of sound" (NME, 1983); "Culling is a densely packed, closed and clenched fist of a record" (Sounds, 1983); "The Womad side offers tape-looped phrases segueing in and out of focus, electronic twitterings and squalling ethnic wind instruments all clawing at each other like an orgy in an abattoir" (Melody Maker, 1983); "Twenty years on, TCIC remains dislocated and disconnected from anything remotely like western rock n' roll, and remains one of the strangest stylistic U-turns out there. Best approached with a similar zeal to finally seeing A Clockwork Orange at the cinema for the first time" (Whisperin' & Hollerin', 9/03)


The remainder of the band's back catalogue is available on the Ronin label.


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