Jonestown Politics

As i write this on the 13th of March 2019, the United Kingdom is on the precipice of a peacetime crisis on a scale beyond the comprehension of anyone who’s younger than about ninety. The two main political parties are fiddling about, each looking to please a tiny subset of their most extreme supporters. Both lack the courage to face the public and explain the steps that need to be taken for the continued smooth running of the country.

I originally intended to release this as part of an album later in the year, but as there is such little hope of anything changing over the next couple of weeks, I thought I’d give you this track now. So here it is: I present to you a Megadrive-based industrial music celebration of political apathy and inaction.

For those interested in the technical aspects, this track is produced to run on a Sega Megadrive. The sampled audio aspects are are little snippets bounced together in Reaper and played through the Megadrive’s DAC. Though they don’t always marry up, i thought the effect sounded like an intentional nod to traditional tape-based manipulation and i liked that. I also used various sounds from both the Megadrive’s FM and PSG chips. The background sample is an audio artefact on the Jonestown death tape, found on the internet archive.

Special thanks to Olen Sluder for tracking and flacing the Jonetown tape sampled on this track. Original cover photo was by Ilias Bartolini.

This track is available on a Creative Commons Attribution-share-alike 3.0 license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Preview

Stream/Buy

Bandcamp
YouTube
Sound Cloud
Tidal
Google Play
Spotify
Apple Music
Amazon
deezer-logo-square
Choon_white