Last August our record-releasing arm – the Quietus Phonographic Corporation – released Grumbling Fur’s Preternaturals, a gorgeous record that The Times said was "as fascinatingly unnerving as it is pleasingly listenable". We were, of course, thrilled to proverbial bits about the whole thing. Just a few short weeks later and the presses were churning again as we had the distinct honour of releasing a single by The Charlatans, artists that tQ’s Luke Turner described as "the band you went to after realising Oasis had gone shite – they had better tunes, better attitude, better hair". ‘Talking In Tones’ happened to be a belter too. Again, bits. We were proverbially chuffed to them.
So you can imagine our collective joy when in November, Grumbling Fur remixed ‘Talking In Tones’, spacing the whole thing out and adding a sense of delicious macabre to the arrangement. It’s like the feeling you might get when you introduce two friends who end up getting married, but not in that horrible way where they’re always making out at the pub. More like when you introduce two friends who get married and remix each other’s singles.
Like a beautiful ménage a trois, then, the collaboration has now taken another step with Norwich-based artist Michael James Lewis remixing the ‘Talking In Tones’ video to match the Grumbling Fur remix. The video has all the immersive, dissociative discomfort of the remix as it decays into the unrecognisable. Watch it above courtesy of QuietusTV.
What’s more, Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra will perform tonight at Royal Festival Hall, backing Mark Titchner’s immersive video work ‘Rose’ in which, "through increasingly unsettling sections, affirmative texts, like those found in self-improvement manual and corporate speak, creep gradually towards something more sinister". It promises to be stunningly unnerving. The show begins at 7 pm and information can be found by clicking here to go to the event page.
