Josh Wodak (aka archangle) is a sometime artist, othertimes a person, and occasionally a reluctant member of the human species (you know, on those oft/off days when actions speak louder than words and unspeakable acts are spoken about).
His first instrument was a cardboard tissue box (minus tissues) held between the legs while played with a wooden school ruler as a bow. At age five he was upgraded to a cello, although he didn’t warm to this as he was well absorbed with all the different sounds that you can get from hitting a box with a stick. Since then music has seeped into his psyche like a pasteur pipette onto sugar cubes. Creativity was successfully stifled with classical cello, piano and musicianship studies at an aptly named Conservatorium (for Conservative) Moozack. After 12 years of that shite he put down classical for the token teenage rebellion of renouncing it all by picking up electric guitars, forming freak-out (pre)post-rock and/or roll bands in the good ‘ol daze b4 post-rock. During a year traipsing across India he chanced upon a Swiss mystic who had constructed a recording studio in a wild outdoor shack in the fields by a remote Himalayan village. An album project – ‘Love and Satisfaction on the Duna 25’ - was born with fellow freaks who had also stumbled across this angelic madman. Through this he learnt about d.i.y studios and recording as this is where and how ‘All Over the Psychedelicatessence’ started. Since 2001 he has been home recording electroacoustic+electronic musics. Josh doesn’t perform live coz of unfond memories of playing some Bach Cello Suites at age 8 to a largely unreceptive primary school at assembly, and also coz Wayne Coyne hit his head on the nail when he said "if someone was to ask me what instrument do I play, I would say the recording studio”.
A second album is in the pipeline. Exterminators have been sent in to smoke it out of its gangrenous trenches so that it doesn’t take seven years from conception to realisation like the first one did.
Process Byproduct:
The album was collectively written according to strict strictures of spontaneous improvisational composin (except tr 1, 6, 7, 9 by Josh) or, in someone elses words, we like jammin…we hope you like jammin too…
It was recorded in 13 sessions between 2001-3 in Sydney, Australia @ PhatCupOfTea, Bondi + Super Love Brain, Nulladale with Tr6pt3 coined + recorded with The Magic Doughuts @ Mike Hafliger’s Duni Fire Recording Studio in Kalga Village, Parvati Valley, Indian Himalaya.
It’s a bit all over the shop coz sessions disbarred discussions/planning/preparation/rehearsal/whatnot of what sound whirlds were concocted. Instead we pooled our resources by forming hopelessly convoluted cybernetic systems of interconnections between an arsenal of acoustic+electronic instruments and then let loose the dog off the leash to explore the foods of imagination. Carrier pigeons passed judgement from the studio window sill, and later handed down their sentence that our pigeonholes were experimental/improv/ electroacoustic/ambient/post-folk/noise/sound-art/glitch/electronica which rolled together they pronounced 'eclectrictronica' coz it rolled right off their beaks. We told the carrier pigeons that they should stick to their day job of undermining the postal service.
Out of earshot of the pigeons, I then subjected these live recordings to live improvisational editing/mixing/mangling/processing as they were compiled through post-production. Residue of the original spontaneity is embedded into the lasagne layers of sounds, so the eventual outcome stews somewhere between chaos and control.
