Back from the dead!

Hi all and apologies for the lack of updates lately, however all is well in our Paranoid world and as if to prove it, we have another free podcast queued up and ready to go.

The September podcast will be the last one for the time being (we have after all put out a new release every month for the past 12 months!!! - no mean feat!). We will be putting podcasts up a little less frequently from now on, but what a treat we have for you this time...

Another mini-album in fact. Clocking in at around the 24 minute mark, 'Enclosed' is another step further into the darkness and exhibits a startling mastery over the dark ambient genre where acoustic elements and sound manipulation combine with Cris's dark lyrical themes in an uncomparable manner.

Hear it for yourself... HERE or subscribe via the iTunes store!

Dark Grave

The Paranoid Foundation can now be found in the band directory at www.darkgrave.com - the gothic music ezine. Of course, we would hardly consider ourselves as goths or a part of any definitive scene for that matter. However, that said, we certainly do have a certain attraction to the darker side of life/music/art...

August Podcast

Since i'm going to be away for much of the summer, August comes early for Paranoid fans. The August podcast is now online and can be found in the usual places i.e. in iTunes or by clicking HERE.

It's another exclusive piece... this time a 25-minute instrumental outtake from the Paranoid 404 'Anew Design' sessions back in 2007. This project saw Cris experiment with minimal synth and electronic textures and the podcast features a brooding trip into his distinctive haunted audio atmospherics.

The August podcast is the 11th of the series. This is the penultimate edition for the time being... expect another great episode in September and then a little more infrequently from then onwards. However we are keeping ourselves very busy in other areas... expect to hear more about our ongoing activities very soon!

No Pigeonholes>European Edition

More airplay for the Paranoid Entity CD! This time Don Campau will be playing the track 'Don't Tell' on his eclectic radio show 'No Pigeonholes' on Radio Marabu, Germany, via European FM, Shortwave and Internet broadcast. www.radiomarabu.de

You can find out more about Don Campau and his radio shows and the various projects that he is involved with HERE

Don has been playing the best in independent and experimental music since the 80's, so it's certainly worth checking out his broadcasts.

Recession Era

It's podcast time, and for the month of July, we have another of my solo pieces. This one is entitled 'Recession Era' and the concept is to portray the mood of the current economic downturn and its social consequences via a 30 minute audio piece. Like the rest of the series, you can download it/listen for free.

To create the music, I used only a selection of instruments and audio devices that were lying unused around my home. Most of them were budget, lo-fi instruments chosen to give the desired gritty sound I was looking for. They included... electric guitar, harmonium, viola, theremin, drum machine and buddha machine. The piece was created and mixed in a single session and is thus full of glitches, errors and suchlike that I feel give character and are in keeping with the general theme of recession and the need for audio thriftyness!

See what you think by listening... HERE.

You can also subscribe to the series in iTunes - just search for Paranoid Podcast in the iTunes store.

On the airwaves

The first radio play for the Paranoid Entity disc is happening, courtesy of two of our favourite shows...

Firstly the excellent 'Le Vestibule' show hosted by Jean-Francois Fecteau on CFOU 89,1 FM, Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada has already played the second track from the album, 'Don't Tell'. Even if you missed this show, you can listen again and will find the archives HERE

Secondly, another of our favourite broadcasters, Gordon Taylor will be playing material from the disc for the first time on his Infectious Unease show, tomorrow 23rd June. The show is on from 11pm–1am Tuesdays on 96.5 Inner FM Melbourne, Australia (Eastern Standard Daylight saving time). For more information on this show, click HERE

We hope you manage to tune in and enjoy what you hear, both shows are an excellent resource for the best in dark alternative music and we highly recommend that you check them out...

New Review

...this time for the Paranoid Entity disc. The first review (that we know about) to roll in for the 4Closure release.

It comes courtesy of Frans de Waard at the Dutch Vital Weekly web/e-mail magazine. Frans has never been our greatest fan, but we are our course grateful that he takes the time to review our material.

CLICK HERE to see the review (scroll down and find the piece towards the end of the page).

Here's hoping he'll like the next one better!

Psychotropic Zone Review

We have had a late review for our last Paranoid Foundation album 'Life Death Indifference' roll in from the excellent Psychotropic Zone. This Finnish ezine run by Santtu Laakso predominantly covers the best in psychedelic music so we are honoured that he gave our disc a listen since it somewhat falls between the cracks of many genres. Anyhow, the review is a good one, and you can find it HERE

If that whets your appetite and you'd like to hear more then the disc can be found for sale on CDBaby (along with several of our other releases HERE or just search for Paranoid Foundation on iTunes if downloads are more your thing!

More links to reviews of our material coming up soon...

Killing Joke

Blog time again... i've been away for a couple weeks on holiday, hence the lack of posts. My trip away included a visit to the Isle of Wight festival. This event can be rather too mainstream for my tastes, but due to it being held in my home town I usually attend. And for me there is often something worthwhile going on in amongst the more obvious pop acts.

This year's best performance for me was by Killing Joke... a band whose catalogue i've dipped my toe into over the years without finding much out about them. I remember being intruiged by their 'love like blood' single back in the 80's (when I was still a child!) and a few years later had a cassette copy of their 2nd album 'What's THIS for...!' . In the early 90's I was seduced by their 'Exorcism' single and subsequent 'Pandemonium' album after hearing that Jaz Coleman insisted on recording his vocals in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid in Egypt! Very rock'n'roll and something that surely goes a long way to creating a cult aura.

Anyway... nothing prepared me for their absolutely blinding performance on the Sunday night in the Big Top. Dark, heavy and hypnotic with inter-song banter about war, UFO's and the dead. It appeared to scare many of the unprepared festival go-ers, but the performance was right up my street! I've always been strongly attracted to the darker side of life and the Joke soundtracked where my head was at on Sunday night perfectly. Go see them soon if you can. Here's a picture that hopefully conveys the shamanistic vibe perfectly. Vocalist Jaz Coleman triumphantly holds aloft some kind of talismanic device that rather disturbingly contains a portion of deceased bassist Paul Raven's ashes...

Podcast time again!

It seemed like that no sooner had I uploaded the May edition, June appeared and so here is another edition of our podcast.

This month we have another free and exclusive download: an all-new mini Paranoid Foundation album! 'Breaker' is a 10 track, 25 minute ambient-noir album. Heavy on the dark textures and featuring guitar, bass, synth textures and field recordings, each of the short tracks feels like a brief sonic postcard from the abyss.

Click here for June Paranoid Podcast!

No album artwork for this one, here are a few of my images that for me conjure up the mood...







Enjoy!

It's here...

Our 10th release! On sale soon. Details to follow...

Announcing the May Podcast edition

Another month... another Paranoid Podcast! For May we have a unique edition of somewhat historical significance. A collection of Crispin Lee's early works entitled 'This Was the Future... Then'.

As a teenager in SE London during the 1990's, Cris was immersing himself in an eclectic selection of punk, post punk, indie and outsider music. Bands such as the Sex Pistols, the Fall, Joy Division and Flying Saucer Attack provided the musical foundations that inspired him to begin crafting his own material in his own distinctive style. With raw instrumentation accompanied by tormented lyrics, the origins of the paranoid sound can be found here.

Listen here for free... http://paranoidfoundation.jellycast.com/podcast/feed/5 or search for Paranoid Podcast in the iTunes store.

Reason to be cheerful...

...no, nothing to do with a new happy-sounding Paranoid Foundation. Just sharing some insight into the creative process!

Ok, so there are many ways of recording and generating sounds and between us, we have probably tried most of them. However, inevitably bringing everything together whether we are using electronic or acoustic instruments or even field recordings involves using some kind of computer software.

One particular piece of music software I have used consistently throughout the past few years is 'Reason' - a virtual studio application from a Swedish company, Propellerheads. Reason enables you to sequence together drum beats, samples and create all manner of weird and wonderful sounds. I've just (finally!) upgraded to the latest version (4) of the the software and it has some pretty incredible new editions. Including a rather amazing sounding synthesizer module:


These past few days i've had a lot of fun getting my head around the new functions and generating various off-the-wall noises. However, having all this functionality counts for nothing without the desire to create and some good ideas to go with it.

In fact many of my favourite pieces of music were created using limited tools or very basic instrumentation. As useful as it is to be able to create any sort of tone imaginable, having limited means often forces you to think in a more creative manner. With a program like Reason 4, it's important to take a disciplined approach and not get lost in a novelty soundworld... something i'm only just getting to grips with.

Right, where did I put that manual...!

Disturbed?

Being a proudly underground act and producing music of a dark and uncommercial nature is unlikely to endear us to a vast fanbase and score us high on the hit parade, but we have been selling a consistent quantity of CDs/downloads each month. However, eclipsing all other sales is one track in particular.

'Disturbed' is the 4th track on our 3rd PF album 'the Music of Chance'. I happen to think it's a pretty solid effort on that particular album, but then it sits nicely with all the other material on there. For some reason though it is our top seller by quite some margin. We have no idea why, but suspect it's getting some heavy rotation out there on an internet radio station?! Care to enlighten us?

In any case it's great to know that people are checking out are tracks, and interesting that tunes are being played in isolation. We generally sequence albums together to be taken in as a whole so we were a bit surprised. But, hey it's all good.

Btw, the thought entered my head that the keen downloaders out there might be confusing our track with someone else's, but a quick itunes search only threw up 2 other tunes entitled 'disturbed'... one by Peter Gabriel and the other by the Sugababes. Any fans of either purchasing our track by mistake might quite possibly be very disturbed indeed! Yes please...

Introducing the band...

In order to bypass the madness of posting to and updating several websites, this will now be the main repository of Paranoid Foundation news and general musings on day-to-day life.

In case you have been hiding under a huge rock, or possibly just oblivious to the (very) underground dark ambient/industrial/whatever-you-want-to-call-it scene, the Paranoid Foundation are a musical/multimedia act focusing on the darker elements of the human psyche. For samples of our music and details of our CDs/downloads/podcasts amongst many other things, please visit our website at http://www.paranoidfoundation.com/. Otherwise, feel free to hangout here and get an idea of what we are all about.

There are 3 main members of the 'Foundation... myself (Andy) - I take care of day-to-day business and contribute various sounds and the occasional piece of artwork, Cris - the resident musical genius and Tetsu - our Japanese artist extraordinaire. We have been plying our trade for nearly 6 years now.

As far as latest news is concerned... we are currently preparing for our 10th official release! For the first time in our history, we are expanding our horizons and not restricting ourselves to our own musical output. Not quite... Cris was the instigator and had a hand in the production of our next CD, but it also features various other musical and not-so-musical personnel. All going well, it'll be out at some point during the summer.

So... the CD in question features 3 tracks, comes in at a shade under 30 minutes and is entitled '4Closure' with 'Paranoid Entity' as the artist name.

File under 'dark and spacey'. Here's what the artwork will look like:

More details to follow...