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Blood Are My
Streets
7m
01. Ho w Empty
na 6m
age Sau
02. Sav
unition
7mm
03. Amm
4m
eflies
04. Fir
0m
sFear 1
05. les
Guts
06. JOIN US
Photo by thivierr (cc-by-sa) http://www.flickr.com/photos/thivierr/
6m
07. Zombies Don't Feel Pain 5m
08. Welcome to the Land of the Living, Dead Man 10m
09. The Ruins of Earth 10m
the Band
John O. - gtr, eb
ow, effects
Miles - bass
Kenny - drums, pe
rcussion
Joey Murphy - gu
itar
Cetx - synth, no
ise, effects
George - engineer
, random instrume
nts
Klaatu - post pr
oduction, sample
s, dubs n' edits
f
This album makes extensive use of:
The fantastic artists from freesound.org
The easiest way to find the samples used on this album is to click in your web
browser's location bar and type in
freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=foo
but replace foo with any of the numbers below:
1886, 1888, 1890, 1892 virotic
23092 Anton
9428, 9429, 79708 thanvannispen
58626 kathol
61063 kozos
86241 Timbre
53380 eric5335
86679 86680 86681 86682 86683 86684 epanody
33568 ERH
89345 Corsica
16119 Incarnadine
36598 dobroide
44410 bennychico11
97790 CGEffex
71247 Microscopia
96533 Omar_Alvarado
95875 Timbre
And the work of these marvelous archivists at archive.org:
archive.org/download/Dragnet_OTR/Dragnet_51-09-
27_ep120_Big_September_Man.mp3
archive.org/details/BloodyPitOfHorror
With the talent of:
* Cheryl Jones - "Fireflies" text
* Skirlet Hutsenreiter - "Firefles" voice
** Jaime Slavinsky - The Zombie Huntress
** Zac McCoy - "True love means not being afraid to kill"
° Gort - Anti Zombie Liberation Militia
Graphics:
Front Cover photo: Netta Sadovsky
Design: Klaatu
Gnu Image Manipulation Program, Scribus, KDE 4
"WC Rhesus A Bta" (blood splatters)
"Grease Monkey", "Luxi Mono", "Luxi Serif", "Optimus
Princeps", "Liberation Mono"
All fonts will be easiest to acquire by downloading the Great Linux Multimedia Sprint
package. For more info see slackermedia.info/multimedia/sprint.html
Photo by Ateo Fiel (cc-by) http://www.flickr.com/photos/ateofiel/
Last Chance Fester was the brainchild of synthesizer artist Cetx, who happened to have
an affinity for concept albums, like Aphrodite's Child's 666, Klaus Schulze's X, Yes' Tales
of Topographic Oceans, and The Makai's debut album.
He had the idea to do an album about a zombie apocalypse and to call the album Last
Chance Fester.
The tracks for this album were efforts toward that goal, and the result was one of the most
structured and balanced Fat Chance Lester of all. Heck, one might even call it a concept
album. And because most concept albums I've ever heard were from the days of old
records, I split up the track listing into two imaginary sides, just like on a vinyl. Feel free
to listen to the tracks in these two sets.
The opening track, How Empty Are My Streets was always the first track. It was meant
to be an introduction to the post-zombie-apocalyptic world that serves as a stage for the
rest of the album. Mile's bass is melodic in this track, a common technique of a few
soundtrack composers. I could drop names but given that they're French, it would only
make me sound more pretentious than I already do for having called this a concept album.
The next track came together last of all, after Dave Yates mentioned on episode 126 of his
Lotta Linux Links podcast that he'd seen a b-movie called The Bloody Pit of Terror,
which turned out to be The Bloody Pit of Horror and was an Italian film dubbed into
English with some of the best bad-horror-movie quotes and scenarios in it that any
sample artist could ever want. Combined with the aggressive horror music that Fat
Chance Lester pumped out, I did my best invocation of one of my main influences,
Skinny Puppy, and started creating a soundscape about as horrorific as they come. The
title comes from a brainstorm session in IRC initiated by Pegwole; whatever the question
was, diggsIt came up with Savage Sauna and I stole it.
The third track, Ammunition, is a straight-forward rock piece that gives the album a
good dose of driven, constant music that evokes, for me, the persistance of the zombie
huntress that is the album's main character. We also hear the zombie huntress here for the first
time, telling her zombie-killing companion Boy, you need a bigger gun.
For this project, Fat Chance Lester did something they rarely seemed to do: jam for a limited
amount of time to make a single, clear statement. One of these statements was the fourth track,
which was, when I was starting to mix this album, the first "sensitive" piece I'd heard by them.
it's funny because later I'd find many other tracks far softer and delicate than this, but at the
time I was amazed at Cetx's lilting synth work, juxtaposed with Mile's frightening and grinding
bass.
The words being spoken in the fourth track came from an unexpected source. I got an email
from a friend, Cheryl, who I'd met and walked to dinner with at the South East Linux Festival.
On our walk, I saw a firefly, and I commented about how I'd never seen one in real life before.
She later emailed me about how she had found it surprising to hear someone so unfamiliar with
fireflies. Her email was some of the most beautiful prose I'd ever read, so I emailed her and
asked if I could use her text in a project I was working on. She graciously said I could (don't
you just love free culture?), and so I arranged for my friend Skirlet to acquire a Zoom H2
recorder and to speak the email for me. She did the text justice with that unnervingly child-
like voice of hers. To me, the track is about appreciating beauty after you become too busy
killing zombies to be able to do so.
Side A closes with lessFear, a spooky and harsh track that was originally simply called
"Zombie Killers". The talented Jaime Slavinsky, our zombie huntress hero, utters the
determined, threatening words through the second half of the song that, for me, makes the
concept of zombie killing transcend low budget horror movies and become something we
really all can identify with; who among us has nothing in our life as threatening as a group of
zombies coming at us to eat our flesh? It might not seem like a big deal to an outside observer,
but we've all got things to overcome. Jaime echoes the resolve we all have, or want to have.
So, onto Side B then.
Photo by Josh Jensen (cc-by-sa) http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwjensen/
The next track takes its title from Evil Dead (but if you're an Evil Dead fan you already
knew that) and its inspiration from Rosemary's Baby and 666. The idea that orgasmic
sound effects also sound startlingly like near-death groans of pain inspired me to mix
some sounds in with the heavy chaos in the beginning. They were intended to be cries of
pain, really; I still get this mental image of our zombie huntress bloody and injured,
crawling and fighting her way out of a zombie den. But knowing that it was originally
intended to be sexual by the freesound.org artist that created the samples made me then
think of Rosemary's Baby, so I played Polanski's film on the big screen of my film
school and played this music over it. It had a great effect, and so I found some evil
incantations on freesound.org to play at the end of the track.
Next comes the other gentle track from Fat Chance Lester, our moment to breathe and
reflect. This one is even softer than Fireflies and one that I took as the track signifying
that the zombie huntress had suffered some great defeat recently and now needed time to
recover. I had the beginning quote True love means not being afraid to kill done by Zac
McCoy, a stage actor with a real talent for saying completely insane things as if though
he really believed them. And I had to call Jaime Slavinsky back into the studio for much
of this, because it was one of the later tracks I'd discovered and needed the extra dialogue
for it. Happily she's a true professional (you know, a real actress) and came back in for
pick-ups.
Welcome to the Land of the Living, Dead Man is the track in which, at least in my
mind, the last vestiges of an organized militia come and bail our hero out. Its leader, of
course, is Gort, my former podcast co-host. He said he recorded the dialogue in his
living room, yelling at the top of his lungs about the impending zombie threat. He had to
stop when the neighbours came knocking on his door to see what was going on. Happily
he'd gotten three good takes before that point, which I then chopped up and actually used
bits and pieces from each.
Finally there is The Ruins of Earth, taking its title like so many other Fat Chance Lester titles,
from an old 1960s dime novel compilation of sci fi short stories. This track is the other side of
How Empty Are My Streets in many ways; it is a driven track, one that is somehow infused
with determination and confidence. It's our zombie huntress, traveling the empty roads, ready
to fight more zombies, and to keep doing so for as long as necessary. While the first track of
the album is a lament about the new, destroyed world, this track is the acceptance of it, and the
resolution to live in it no matter what. The fireflies might have been scared away by zombies,
but Fat Chance Lester hasn't been.
Happy hunting, zombie killer.
‐ Klaatu
ps - I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that zombies have quite a different meaning to the
computer hacker. So if you run Unix or Linux and choose to interpret this entire album as a
tale of how ps aux | grep Z leads the heroic sys admin to kill -9, then I won't
argue with you.
Photo by Eric Ingrum (cc-by) http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericingrum/
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