Ivory Bunker Recordings

On The Verge Of The Best Madness So Far, a panicked flight from the Plateau of Leng as conjured up in my debut The Necrophonicon (see this post), to which this Mini-Album was intended to be the second chapter. Building on one of the core tenets of Lovecraft’s work, madness – a state of mind I was quite interested at the time (evil tongues might say somewhat near as well), and a staple in the discussion of the life and work of some of the more, let’s call them extravagant, artists. So naturally a great field of exploration, sonically and in the tapestry of title, cover, etc. that usually comes packaged with the musick.

Musically it was a continuation of the breakbeat/breakcore/glitch IDM inspired sound I was producing on The Necrophonicon, although having played a couple of live performances in between finishing the former and starting to work on On The Verge…, this was a noticeable influence and some of the tracks did, in their first incantations, stem from some of those live performances. Most noticeably Wounding of the Bright, By Hook and By Crook and, pretty much directly lifted from my live-set, Lucifera Is A DJ, a schlager crossover mashup of Luciferette and I off the Necrophonicon.

Wounding of the Bright as interpreted by Stable Diffusion

Wounding of the Bright is, of course, Hexagram 36 from the I-Ging, a book I had first encountered many, many years earlier in high school, which I had rediscovered at the time I recorded On the Verge… via Philip K Dick’s The Man In The High Castle.

(If you excuse me wandering off on a tangent there, it was – once again – many years later that I connected the dots and got the reference to PKD and the I-Ging as well as the Horselover Fat character from Valis in the track Oh Merry-Go Round on Current 93/Hilmar Örn Hilmarson’s classic “Island” album:

“Philip throws hexagrams
To discover the cosmos
Horselover fat
Talks with Christ
Metal fish glints
On the girl’s breast
And the Ape’s
Mock universe
Dissolves…“

thus things going full circles by coincidence, connecting the dots of various influences… Gnosticism hasn’t been one yet, tho.
Current 93 would later on be a direct influence for Some Stars not yet Black Holes (although the influence doesn’t go much further than the title…) but I digressed further than intended, thus let’s return to our Best Madness…

…So far, so good. “No Reason to get Euclidic” is based on a joke, whereby “going non-euclidic” was an in-group euphemism for being off your t*ts (as they say), or more soberly called, entering altered states. All purely theoretical, of course.

The Cruelty Knits A Snare, is a line from a William Blake Poem. I’ll leave it to you to search which one now… the track also appears on a mammoth compilation – “PHOTON COLLISIONS” – by Welsh brothers and underground legends Somatic Responses that came out around 2013. Do check that one out!

Last not least the EP ends with a remix of Wounding of the Bright by Dino Felipe! I first came across Dino’s releases on Schematic (and am very stoked to have since also released there), before meeting him on Soulseek (a place where I also met Robbie Martin from Record Label Records – another story…) and eventually asking him for a remix. The result, “Disflated”, was described as “Science-Play-Bunny” by Rom from Schematic.

The whole EP was originally planned to come out as 12″ on Isolate Records. However, after Wai Cheng sadly passed away much too young, that sadly never came to be. So eventually it only saw a release via Ivory Bunker Bandcamp in 2020. With two additional tracks, the above mentioned By Hook and By Crook and A.O.S (aka Austin Osman Spare)… That ought to do it for Trivia… if you’re still here, or if you’ve scrolled down to here… without further ado:

On The Verge of the Best Madness So Far on Bandcamp:

On streaming services and other stores:

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