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?  

Why Witch? Why Robot?

A wise women once told me that if she could live her life again she would spend it making charcoal drawings of the countless yew trees that have been growing for an eternity in Little Langdale. A small valley hidden away on the road to nowhere in the Lake District. This thought flashed through my mind as I lay face down in the mud of a nameless field in Northern France. 


The year was 1918 and the Great War was coming to a bitter conclusion, no one had won. As the aftershocks felt by the 100 years of European history would attest. I had fought before and was no stranger to the slaughter. The depths of degradation that human kind could plunge itself into no longer came as a surprise, we are a bitter and twisted people, broken in oh so many ways. I pulled myself together and stood up “C’mon Men!” I shouted and four figures emerged from the ubiquitous sludge, their profiles lit by the cacophony of mortar explosions behind them. We started towards the enemy’s bunker, the bunker was spitting fire from the machine gun placements, spitting fire like a novice dragon not yet taught to roar. 


We were roaring though, we were dragons; single-minded killing machines and we flew on the wind of impending victory. I raised my pistol as I caught sight of a German infantryman attempting to fix a jammed rifle, but as I pulled on the trigger all the came out was a small flag, with the word “Bang!” written upon it. Just then I felt myself caught up in what can only be described as a whirlwind, my feet left the ground and I was taken higher and higher. I was surrounded on all sides by a multitude of rainbow bright colours. 


The theatre of war stretched out before me I could see beyond the front lines, beyond the visible stench of death to the villages far behind the trenches, the villages where a dissemblance of normality still existed, save for the constant stream of foreign troops pouring through the guesthouses, cafes, tabacs and brothels. Some local girls had found love with these soldiers in the midst of this, the most insane form of human madness. My thoughts were over come with this glimmer of hope as I flew up into the air until the war torn land below me was no-more than a brown spot on an otherwise luscious green and deep blue planet. Thoughts of doomed love were encompassing my very being. Young peasant girls left pregnant as their new sweethearts left for the frontline, leaving nothing but some chocolate, empty promises of a better life and an unborn child. But for an exquisitely brief moment both lovers were in bliss of calm, surrounded on all sides by the sights, sounds and smells of war. They were the only two people on earth, no-one had felt like that before (of course countless lovers had, will and do feel like that everyday and will for all time) but in their eyes no-one had felt like that, no-one could feel like that, this was a singularly unique moment. I snapped back to reality… 


I was quite literally floating in space, that old philosophy dictum sprang to mind, how do you spot a philosopher? While other people are getting on with their lives, going to shops, going to work, picking the kids up from school etc, the philosopher would be the person standing in the midst of all this normality shouting “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WE ARE FLOATING IN SPACE!!!” The whirlwind which had picked me up from the field had now become a warm protective cocoon shielding me from the icy vastness of space. The Earth grew smaller and smaller until it was mealy another ball of reflected light encircling the Sun. Never had I imagined that a human eye would be able to witness such beauty, little did I know that my eye was no longer human and the inter-stellar symphony being played out in front of face was being conducted by a Witch! The whirlwind which was taking me deeper and deeper into space was made up of millions and millions of Nanobots, who were changing my entire physiology, replacing my flesh and bone with circuitry, pistons and a new mineral based exoskeleton. I was told later that this process took almost 200 Earth years, but time meant nothing as my consciousness had been suspended a mere 10 minutes into my galactic flight as soon as the Nanobots had entered my brain. By the time I arrived at my destination I was a very different creature, only certain memories remained which were all my experiences of doomed love. This had given me a rather surly temperament almost like a teenager who’d just been kicked to the curb by a more experienced girlfriend. I was moody, plagued by poisoned recollections of saying the wrong words or doing too little too late. My consciousness was not sufficiently developed to recognise that in actual fact I was stood on a ‘Caraltutumbog’ a small meteor about 20 light years from Earth. Caraltutumbog was now home to The Witch, after she had been banished by the Incas some 1000 years before the first shot fired in anger of the Great War. Strangely enough not a shot fired in Europe, but artillery round fired across the bow of a German Freight Liner leaving Melbourne harbour in Victoria, Australia. 


The Witch was once the proud figurehead of a violently matriarchal sect of the Inca people, as ruler, The Witch was seen as a living god. This was all fine and dandy until they found out about space flight. Then the shit really hit the fan. These were a people who for all intents and purposes lived in middle age squalor, open sewers swamped the streets of their mountain home. The only way to cook food was on open fires and there had not been sufficient advances in agricultural sciences to provide a sustainable farming system. These were still Hunter Gatherers, reliant on chance as much as proven techniques for feeding and clothing their families. This is why their knowledge of advanced space travel technologies seemed such an incongruity. The Witch of course had always had this knowledge it was innate within her being. But she couldn’t tell them that could she? This was not the only time she had been worshiped as a god. The Witch had existed since the dawn of time, she was part of the fabric of the universe, she existed simultaneously in countless dimensions, all knowledge learned and yet to be learned was hers. This is why she had seen nothing wrong with imparting the basics of alien spaceflight technology to this crude tribe of Incas she had found herself knocking around with. Like the death of Houdini, this arrogance backfired, when in the dead of night the Incas decided they had had enough of this bossy Witch and built a rocket to shoot her off into space where she won’t be able to complain that her “FUCKING TOAST IS BURNT!!”. This posed some problems for the Incas, The Witch was taller and heavier than an average woman, she was at least 20 foot high from the tips of her toe to the top of her pointed hat, her arms were unusually long as well, at least the same length as her height, she used them as a Gorilla would, to walk on. Her hands were made of semi-precious stones, but this was as a result of a self-inflicted cosmetic operation, what ever The Witch wasn’t, she certainly was vein. But the Incas put all these potential problems to the back of their minds and got to work, they constructed the rocket around where The Witch lay asleep, and at sunrise they pressed the big round and green button which said “GO”. The Witch shot off into space and ended up here on this meteor, unable to do anything but sulk. The Witch saw that she had two choices, either use the collected debris of the rocket to fire herself back to a planet with some dissemblance of society (not even The Witch was able to teleport) or use the debris to construct millions of Nanobots to send back to Earth find a suitable candidate to turn into a humanoid killing machine, bring them back to her and exact a plan of revenge on all humanity. 


The Witch was a proper spiteful bitch, so she plumped for the second option. So here we are The Witch And The Robot, sitting on a deserted rock, planning revenge. Stop. Revenge is not a good thing, no-one wins and revenge is all about winning, it is completely pointless, it is without point. But the yearning for revenge can damage people, even people as ever-living as The Witch. She may have been a Witch but don’t be in any doubt, she was certainly a person too. Stop. Or it may have happened like this. Listen

Kendal Mountain Film Festival - a story

Those pains were not a heart attack.  
They were psychosomatic, physical manifestations of the guilt he felt, guilt that he bore on his stooped shoulders, guilt that weighed him down like a malevolent Christ child, an evil, poisoned carcass that clung to his back, the same but different from the cherub carried by St Christopher… and ask any priest, vicar or believer because that is HEAVY.


He saw the lies as carcinogen, or cholesterol, with each half-truth he felt his chest tighten and his heart beat harder.

 He had started to dig about four years ago. His ambition was to dig a hole straight through the rocky fell side of Helvellyn right down to the valley floor below, install a lift, then invite tourists to take the easy way to the top and possibly achieve some ‘add on’ sales of bars of chocolate, gifts or souvenirs.

He had always marvelled at the way continental Europe utilise their mountaintops, not chained to the saccharin ideals of the rural idyll or the false utopias promised by Wordsworth and his cronies. ‘The French’ he thought ‘see no problem in plonking ruddy great hydro electricity plants on top of their hills, so a small café on top of mine shouldn’t cause any offence’.

Helvellyn is of course inexorably linked to Wordsworth… On the approach past Grizedale Tarn ‘The Brothers Parting’ marks the place where the gruesome twosome - Wills and Dot, last saw their brother John before he was lost at sea age thirty three and high on Striding Edge, an unknown painter named Charles Gough fell to his death.  A nobody in his lifetime, he was immortalised by his more famous contemporaries in both picture and poem, they seemed fascinated by the macabre fact that his body was not found until three months after his death and his dog remained by his side for those long months, his body was fully clothed but striped to it’s skeleton, the dog, by all accounts looked well fed.

Earth had first been broken on this foolish venture almost a year before and the act of digging quickly gave way to a tilting at windmills. The brown dirt and green slate became his demons and as the psychosis set in, the dreams of selling a mars bar and milky tea whilst providing quick, eco-friendly transport to one of England’s finest views gave way to suicidal urges and the lies…we can’t forget the lies..

The reality was, he had stopped digging three months into the project (the same amount of time it took for that poor unfortunate fleshless wretch to have his body discovered) he had hit rock and his shovel was so ground down it was now no more than a pointy stick. He stood knee deep in a hole, frantically hacking away at solid rock, but he could not see that, he could not see the futility of his plight.



This is where the lies came in, he was digging the hole on a popular tourist path and throughout the day many walker would come up to him and ask if he was alright, he always replied ‘yes thank you’ when he knew perfectly well he was fucked in the head.

Once was fine, what remained of his sane self could shrug that off as being polite, but after months of repeating that single lie, he could take no more. He bent down and picked up a handful of rock and dirt and put it in his mouth, he swallowed. He repeated this action, eating a mixture of stones and soil, filling his mouth crunching it with his now broken teeth.

Blood poured out of his mouth and mixed with the rock and soil, out of the corner of his eye he could see a brightly coloured anorak, it’s wearer was standing, watching him, two walking poles and a red hat. The walker spoke “are you alright?”, he spat out the deadly, blood soaked mountain cocktail, teeth mixed with rock, mixed with blood, mixed with soil. “DOES IT LOOK LIKE IM ALRIGHT IM TRYING TO EAT FUCKING HELVELLYN?” …… the end