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...