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Artist Picks: The Lunchtime Sardine Club

The Lunchtime Sardine Club (aka Oliver Newton) released his lo-fi psych-folk debut album Icecapades on August 12th, via the Sonic Anhedonic Recording Co.. Essentially a collection of short stories set to music, we thought it would be good to get inside the artist's head and ask him which of the tracks he felt was his favourite:



"I was watching a lot of 90’s Strange but True style programs, which was starting to inform some of the subject matter and even production of "Rumours", and one episode in particular really stood out. It was about the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from an island off Scotland called the Flannan Isles.The mainland noticed that the lighthouse had stopped working, so they assembled a crew to go out to to see what the problem was.They had to wait almost 10 days until they could get there due to bad weather, but once there discovered the lighthouse empty; the only sign of disturbance was two overturned chairs in the dining quarters. In this particular program it was suggested that the lighthouse keepers had been turned into three ‘odd looking black birds’, which I imagine is exactly what happened… That story is kind of like a backdrop for the songs lyrical content, the passing of time/seasons/people and the effects it has.

Like pretty much all of the songs on the record it started out acoustic and pretty clean, but I carried on layering guitars and vocals and distorting them on cassette tape until it was thicker and murkier. Then when it came round to mixing the track I wrestled with phasey flange (from having two of the same bits of audio playing at slightly differing speeds because of unruly cassette), muddy bass nonsense and all sorts of fun that made me hate the song for a good few months. I really like how it turned out though, and whilst it certainly has its flaws production wise, I learned a hell of a lot lot mixing it.



The video for the song is about a beach dweller who thinks he is one of the lighthouse keepers reincarnated and believes he can record the sounds from the night they went missing by setting up walkmans and microphones along the beach. Lovely."

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