I have always made dark sounds, from the sounds created for "Windowpane", to the timestretched digeridoos of "Further Back and Faster" for Coil.

From the chopped-up speech of Nine Inch Nails "Gave Up", to the dark intro of "Closer" by NIN (as used in the film *Seven*).

From the twisted re-sampled sounds of The Black Light District album, to the soft but haunting sine waves on "Baby Food".

From the twisted metal sounds on the Coil remix of "Rush" – Depeche Mode, to the strings on "Cold Cell".

Dark sounds seem to be something I just happen to make.

But with so many audio re-makers now around (like Cyclobe, Scanner etc.), I decided to take yet another path and combine my audio sounds with anything I fancied,
hoping to create something unique—out of its time, maybe having no time.

I was determined to make each song ring with real feeling; also I wanted to break free of the chains we sampler users have inflicted on ourselves.

At first, at the beginning of sampling, we sampled silly noises and made tunes. Then we twisted noises and made tunes. Now I feel we can twist soundtracks and make anything we want.

This resulted in a project which has taken the best part of two years to complete — after all, how do you marry the absurd with the dark?

Anybody who heard my vocal samples in "Exploding Frogs" knows I have a sense of the absurd,
so with this in mind the project began.

On this project you'll hear anything from Stephen Hawking waxing lyrically about getting wood, to George Bush giving 4th-grade girls to the Taliban.

But aside from the absurd there is another element here.
The death of John Balance has made the songs he sang all the more poignant.
One song had been pulled from the ether (a lost vocal sung through an obliteration box years ago, thanks to modern processors, was un-processed and delivered clean to be used in a new song "Make Room for the Mushrooms".)

The other song "FJ Nettlefold" is one of John's last ever recordings. In fact, I had been on at him for months to sing it; no sooner was it done, than it seemed he was gone.

On here also is a haunting lullaby on incest, sung by Joanna De Seyne — "No One Needs to Notice". A beautiful song sung about an absurd subject.

So the album is not only a celebration of the absurd, but contains emotions of all human experience.

May God have mercy on my soul.
D.H. 2005

All sculpture created by Marylyn Hyde

Hear MP3 snippets here