07/06/2025
OUT OF THE DARKNESS CAME MORE DARKNESS, UNTIL IT WAS HAMMERED INTO LIGHT
This is the Cover Art for upcoming Fate Razor remix - BlackGuard Wolfpack (Tétaz Dub). It is a retro-snapshot of a headspace, a time, and an out-of-body experience and associated death that changed my entire paradigm. The BlackGuard songs come from the early ‘Melbourne’ era of Fate Razor - a portal of experience that was one of the darkest periods of my life and simultaneously one of the most creatively fruitful. There were many unforgettable characters I encountered in Melbourne; characters such as JeepMaster Warren the psychedelics merriment-maker, and Alt-Rocker Brett in his knee-high wellington boots and the pet python he kept in his lounge room (was not too keen, but harmless - the real problem was the snakes I encountered on my return to Perth…).
During my stay in East St Kilda I also met David Thrussell (of Snog, Soma, and Black Lung infamy) - in turn he introduced me to rising Producer & Mastering Engineer François Tétaz. Franc was a member of Industrial / Experimental / Ambient project Shinjuku Thief and would go onto re/master releases such as Merzbow’s Merzbox CD box set & The Triffids’ seminal album Born Sandy Devotional.
Fortunately François agreed to master what was to be the 1st Fate Razor release, a 7-Track CD.
I had received an unexpected letter from Chicago’s Wax Tax records requesting a follow up demo as they liked the tracks I’d sent months earlier; I was excited obviously and some of the songs on the 7-track were part of a 2nd demo intended to nail the prospect. What happened during and after the mastering/mixing sessions would take a novel to describe, but to summarise - my Father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I spent months torturing myself over whether to return to Perth or selfishly pursue the potential record deal (at least in the short term), one night in North Carlton had my first vivid out-of-body experience in which I watched Fate / Death (represented as a pack of merciless wolves) dragging my father from his house by the throat and realised it was all going down quickly, wrote BlackGuard Wolfpack as a cathartic coping mechanism, returned to Perth to be with my Father at his death, never got to respond to Wax Trax, and in a desperate & broken plight for answers ended up on the radar of a coven of serpentine/occult/religious delusions and practitioners (another novel, another day)…
Amidst the storm, Franc delivered a Dub-ish remix of BlackGuard Wolfpack which blew me away - it was finally released on Bandcamp in 2018, and remastered again for the upcoming Spotify / Streaming release (goes live on the 17th June). The remix is a fresh soundtrack-ish abstraction of the original, but the original version is the one that captures something of the weight and atmosphere of the circumstances that informed it. Strangely enough, later in 2006 François went on to win an award for Feature Film Score of the Year - for the Australian Horror film “Wolf Creek”; There are so many synchronicities in the arc of this story, It’s a metaphysic mathematician’s dream.
It took more than a decade to grasp the central realisations of what I experienced and perceived in that most vivid and traumatic out-of-body. In the years that followed I was to encounter and confirm those startling paradigms again and again in my travels to the deserts in Australia (Uluru) and Turkey (Cappadocia was a haunting experience), across Europe and in the Andes mountains crossing Chile and Argentina. It is the foundational stuff and back-story of the Fate Razor project, and its evolution into the upcoming new albums and EPs currently in progress. For those that resonate with the thread in the words, images, and music, I hope you follow the story as it takes the form it was always intended to.
PS the new releases feature two covers (1st covers for Fate Razor) - The Order of Death by PIL, and Sunshine Felt The Darkness Smile by DAX RIGGS. Stay sane in the membrane.
LE42 - In Lightarmour We Trust
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Fate Razor Playlist now on Spotify...
https://open.spotify.com/track/7afTHKHrcqxGxnyX0aZNUE?context=spotify:playlist:1Ow800Kp3TGubjJyZ72QMo&si=8477145931143457