Fear Of Mountains pt1

Fear of Mountains pt1 is the name of our new album, it will be available to buy from Hide and Horn – a little shop off The Slack in Ambleside from 1^st September 2011.

If anyone does make the trip up to Los Ambleside to purchase the said album, we will also throw in a nice picture and some other treats as well, just to make the journey really worth it…

We are doing this because this is the first part in a trilogy of albums about the Lake District, it is very much a product of place and its difficult to think of a shop that sums up all of the esoteric nuances of The Lakes more then Hide And Horn.

This is their website http://www.hidehornambleside.co.uk/

So that’s it really.

The album has a whole cast of characters in it from Germanic nut-job Kurt Schwitters through to Blake-like mystic and monumental sculptor Josefina de Vasconcellos. This is a picture of of an angel stabbing a boy in the heart drawn in pencil on scrap paper that I found in some folders of Josefina's poetry, I think she would've drawn it when she was around 90 ish, we wrote a song about it, which also appears on the album. 

This is a video to track 5 off the album called ‘Houdini’ although it mentions the master magician and scourge of charlatan psychics by name its not about him, it’s about half remembered regrets.

It features our “friend” DJ Aesthetic Heartbreak and filmed at “Britain’s Favorite View ™” Wastwater…

We are The Witch And The Robot it would be ludicrous to think we’re new to this. We do this. This is what we do……..

Sausage Roll Deep

I work in Croydon, South London, a world away from the Lakes, thought I'd record my trip to Gregg's this morning to get a sausage roll, all these buildings are empty, seems a bit odd considering they are in the centre of a rather large borough of London..  Acres and acres of unused space... Don't have a point like.. just seems odd...  also there's me with a sign I stole from a storage room in the town hall from some long forgotten expo on how great a place Croydon is for investment - could be the same one that attracted the developers who built these now empty offices... then again.. maybe not, blah blah 

wot we do

Muzak

We are a band and we play music so we really should have some here..


Here are some sounds from the past few years....

Josefina

"Fear Of Mountains pt1" is the culmination of 10 or so years of writing songs, we will explain more over time but it's meant to be a bit of a (and it's not a dirty word) concept album about The Lake District, with many of the songs we have been playing in our set since we began finally finding a proper home..


This lady appears in it alot - if you know TWATr then you'll have probably come across her before, she's called Josefina de Vasconcellos, she died a few years back at the ripe old age of 101. 


Just been having a dig around our old Myspace page and came across this, it's a film I made about Josefina when I was a student about 2004, thought all copies had been destroyed after my parents house went and burnt its self down last month so I'm glad it's still out there..... 



A Day Out With Josefina

The Witch And The Robot | Myspace Video

Blinded by the sun...

The Witch awoke and was temporarily blinded by the suns rays, she blinked, rubbed her eyes and began to take in her surroundings. On all sides was a vast sea of rocky desert, with large cliffs off to the distance, the ground was hard, cold and coated with a fine sprinkling of reddish dust. The Witch knew she had to get out of the sun, but there was no shade to be seen, she started to claw at the ground beneath her, as her hands were made of diamonds she had no problem digging through the sedimentary rock. The hole she dug was about 5 foot deep before the ground began to give way, the Witch panicked and began to grasp at the sides of her hole, but the ground beneath her crumbled and she fell hard and fast into the darkness below arms flailing like a rotor-copter or a novice ice skater seeking to minimise the impact of a backwards fall.

After 10 minutes falling in the pitch black the Witch resigned herself to the fate that will be hers for the next two decades, simply falling through space. Luckily the Witch wasn’t thirsty and the hunger pangs stopped after the first week, so that negated the need for any kind of sustenance, apart that is for company…

The Witch was always a sociable creature, the centre of attention at society parties, regaling guests with tales of prohibition era Chicago and her part in the development of Pilates as a safe low impact exercise. But now alone in the darkness she had no one to turn to, no one to hold. Around her neck she wore a redundant circuit board from her first Spectrum ZX, a reminder of the innocence of childhood she had thought, now possibly a lifeline from the inevitable decent into insanity. It was difficult to undertake sophisticated robot engineering while falling at terminal velocity in the pitch black, but through her natural cunning the Witch found a way. Using her rudimentary knowledge of bio-tech and robotics she managed to construct a two inch high mechanoid, a mechanoid with a massive capacity for pathos and understanding, the Witch had used a portion of her brain as the main circuit in the machine, this was the portion of her brain that dealt with any aspect of charity. As a result she lost all compassion, but that was more than made up for by her new friend, simply called ‘Robot’.

They would discuss philosophy and art for what seemed like an eternity but in reality was probably more like 13 years, each would have an opposing opinion, with the Witch inevitably straying to the right in any argument.

Then one day in the middle of a heated debate about the impact of Mertz and Schwitters legacy and the cruel irony of dying from an injury sustained at Daisys café in Ambleside after internment and hoboism, they landed with a splash! The Witch’s sense of direction was thrown into disarray, then she remembered her survival training and just kept still hoping that the air in one of her 54 lungs would bring her to the surface, she could not have been that deep because although her hands were made of diamonds her body was flesh and would have crushed at any great depth. She surfaced and gasped for air, her little robot chum had crawled into her mouth seeking protection not unlike a crocodile taking her young to the water for the first time.

The Witch swam to shore, she had known this place in a past life, the familiar greens and browns of the Lakeland fells rising up to meet the deep clear blue of a crisp winters sky. The pulled the robot from her mouth and spoke “ We shall make this place our home, maybe start a business selling boiled sweets and various colourful confectionary” She smiled “ and kids eat for free”, the robot understandably shocked by this sudden show of charity bleeped as he did “bleep bip bip”, “ I know little one” replied the Witch “ I feel much kinder, maybe that fall was just what we needed, now to work!”  

Witchy Woo!

I had always loved the gentle roll of greenery that defines the Oxford countryside, sitting as I did on my narrow boat, gazing out on the world slowly passing me by, I journeyed deeper into the unknown, injected into the veins of that land like a virus, not unlike Lenin’s return to Russia in the carriages of a sealed train, revolution in mind.

During that long summer of ’53 I would compare my own life to that of the canal, the still shallow waters of a false man-made river, existing purely for function, lacking in any natural current, the centaury old waters grow ever more stagnant and lifeless with each passing year. I was a shell of a man. The war had done that to me. Trained to kill and expected to die, when I survived there was nothing that could be done for me, so I returned to my fathers boat. I had been chased out of London for espousing dangerous theories as fact. The establishment were satisfied with the status quo. they were not interested in hearing how the Nazi leadership had fled to a specially constructed moon base and intended to launch attacks on the allies with their new saucer-like flying machines.

The passion and bluster of these arguments were now drowned out by the delicate whisper of a breeze in the autumnal trees and the constant lapping of water against the slow moving bow, these sounds enveloped me, as I fell asleep.

I awoke with a start. “My eyes My eyes!”  I could not open my eyes. I touched them and felt a crude stitching hold them together. I stopped myself from panicking, took a deep breath and spoke. “Who are you? Why have you done this to me? What do you want from me?” These were questions that I felt had all my bases covered. “No answers, just because” came the reply, it was a female voice, accent-less but with it carried the weight of ages. “That’s no good to me” I said “my eyes have been stitched together, I am no longer on my boat” I was about to rant, but then it dawned on me, I felt around to get my barings but I wasn’t touching anything, I was floating, floating in the air. “And it seems that I am floating” I could never get my words right when in strange situations, there was a lot more I wanted to say. “That’s right, your were ‘boating’ and now you are ‘floating’ Ha !” this was simply not funny, but as I would grow to learn over the years, Witch simply did not have a developed sense of humour. “You are to become Robot” said the Witch “it will be make you immortal, but will take time, as you are to become immortal time really isn’t an issue though Ha Ha!”   That’s how it all began really… as simple as that, Know what I mean?