Shall Be Released: Bong Odyssey by Gareth Liddiard & Rui Pereira (Recordings 1993-98)

Edit: now is up on bandcamp in early 2020!

What was before The Drones and even before The Gutterville Splendour Six? This! Gareth Liddiard and Rui Pereira seeding the seed of noise and distortion in the period 1994-1998 in this Bong Odyssey project which recorded this never before released, brutal album of what is 100% The Drones‘ sound.

So that’s that the very limited info about this released we’ve got plus what Gaz has to say about it just below with the track listing and album cover. I did blog about this last year but now it’s really official and will be released on 4th May 2018 on double vinyl only in gatefold sleeve plus it’s only Edition of 500. With Liddiard’s brand new band Tropical Fuck Storm (TFS) releasing a brand new album at the very same time, I guess we getting the old with the new.

The Miller’s Daughter as track number 16 was later re-recorded as the very first The Drones song in the very late 90’s which was finally released as the title track to the kind-of out-takes, rarties, B-sides etc. comp album in the mid-2000’s. It would be four years before that debut album by The Drones called Here Comes The Lies which was released in 2002. Also wroth noticing MK Ultra was also a side project, very briefly for a support spot on a Band Of Horses tour a few years ago too. I can’t say much more other that the very small audio samples of the songs I’ve heard are unbelievably insane!

Bong Odyssey track listing is:

01. Panzerschokolade
02. Atom Smasher
03. Late Heavy Bombardment
04. Bodyhead
05. Blind Love
06. The Edifice
07. See You Later
08. Do You Remember
09. Legal Ghost
10. Not Something
11. Ghost Tape Number Ten
12. Via Duende
13. Chance Rules
14. MK Ultra
15. Is It That Bad?
16. The Miller’s Daughter
17. Oculus
18. Space Meets The Floor

Then Gareth Liddiard on the record:

“Bong Odyssey is a bunch of stuff Rui and myself recorded in the mid-nineties after we left high school. We were total music nerds into stuff like Suicide, Hüsker Dü, Psychic TV, Merzbow, Big Black, lots of free jazz, Stravinsky and all sorts of weird shit. We lived in Perth which meant we didn’t have many friends into the same stuff so we just worked at our jobs then came home and smoked weed, took acid and everything else, drank booze and messed around on our tape machines. We had a ton of music gear like synths, Hammond organs, drum machines, lots of weird effects units. None of that shit was cool then so we could afford to own it. We weren’t playing many gigs. We’d done the crazy fast and heavy punk thing and we’re moving away from that, as you can tell. We basically jammed and recorded songs at night with no intention of doing anything other than blowing our own minds. Our neighbours hated us and we were always being evicted. I have no idea what people will make of this stuff ’cause it is super weird and fucked up. This is before the Gutterville Splendour Six and right at the beginning of The Drones. When we moved to Melbourne in 2000 to do The Drones thing we sold all of our shit and wound up with guitars only. So naturally we became a guitar band. But between 1993 and 1997 or 1998 we did everything in almost complete isolation without anyone else’s input on all sorts of instruments. Western Australia was so out of touch with the rest of the world and we were so out of step with Western Australia that we just disappeared up our own arses. Bong Odyssey is crazy music for crazy music’s sake. Pure and simple.”

 

After waiting this long to release these recordings we have only got a couple of months to get to a copy of it! I can’t bloody wait for it but you better not miss out, pre-order it here! 

Cheers 🙂

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