This relic is now available via iTunes.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/the-forest-nightmare-ep/id912293371

 

 

 

Some of you may remember me selling it from behind the counter at Havelock street Subway in Swindon. They were bleak times, I can tell you. But working there allowed me to pay for my own record label and fund this EP. Not that it cost much to record – recorded with one mic, in a church, on an analogue 4 track. But it does sound sound warm and lovely and airy and lo-fi. And like I mentioned previously, it’s the record i’m most proud of making. It’s the sound of three people pulling in the same direction, after 5 years of playing together.

The concept behind the whole EP was to jam freely and take reference from free jazz ideas from people such as Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis, by using musical repetitions that alert us to the next section of the piece. However, within this format, the actual style of playing would be more post-rock and post-punk alaSlint (official), Mogwai and The Birthday Party esque. We called our sound ‘Prunk’.

Anyway, yeah, as you can tell, even ten years later, i’m just as enthusiastic about it as I was then…

As well as being available digitally it is still available on cd, so if you would like a physical copy lemme know. They are £3 each.

Here’s a bit more about the project from my book ‘When I was Sixteen I wanted to be Graham Coxon‘ :

Dan continued to write solo stuff until he eventually found sanctuary (and a new band) in London, and like I said, I was happy fronting The Forest Nightmare and we went on to release a couple of ep’s on my own Pow Pow Pow label and do a couple of gigs. Here’s a review by James S of Sounds XP of our first EP:

There are reasons to be terrified of this Nightmare before you even begin. The words started by accident at an open-mic art event in Stroud are enough to strike fear into the heart of any human, but when you then read of the band’s approach to experimenting with loose song structure, you can only fear the worst. Add song titles like I Am King (A Forest Nightmare) Including The Tale Of Simian and Lake Of The Hydra’s Head and you have to be afraid. Very afraid.

Like all good horror though, the anticipation is scarier than the actuality. Whilst the titles suggest prog-rock, the reality proves to be grinding swirls of post-rock, full of menace and foreboding to make up for their lack of direction or purpose. The vocals are thankfully brief throughout, which just about alleviates how awful they are. Monotone singing, shouting and narration all appear in the first two songs alone and the less said about the ‘hilarious’ stoned student rendition of Syd Barrett’s The Gnome, the better. Despite the plethora of minuses , this EP is surprisingly listenable overall, despite the nagging feeling that the band didn’t really want it to be.

We were all really proud of that first ep, and even that captured a particularly funny memory – ‘The Gnome’ featured my housemate Paul, who at weekends used to wake me up at ten in the morning by knocking on my bedroom door clutching a box of wine. He was a bit of a boozehound was ol’ Paul. But we loved him. We called him ‘Paul, the son of Dionysus’. Anyway, one of those mornings ended up with me, Al and Paul doing a dictaphone recording of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Gnome’. Al had slept on my bedroom floor the previous night after a late night in Stroud, and you can hear him laughing constantly throughout. It makes me laugh and smile to myself, even to this day. Good times.

That’s it.

Adam