Fantastique

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Australian answer to People Like Us?

This album is the result of a collision between the tiny Casio CK-10, one of the few Casios with an inbuilt radio, and a bunch of effects pedals. One night in 1995, in an apartment in Chippendale, Sydney, John Encarnacao built an instrument out of these elements and filled a C-90 cassette with improvisations. Over a period of weeks these performances were edited into (some would say) digestible chunks, creating something of a hybrid between noise and pop.

This is true of all tracks except ‘Silence Painted Arrows’ and ‘Moses Meets The Pulverizer’ which were made in the mad laboratory conditions of Sydney Conservatorium with a single turntable, primitive software, and found percussion (whatever was lying around after midnight . . .)

The album title Fantastique refers to Berlioz’s famous symphony. Several mutated fragments of this work are to be found scattered through the album (the titles are fragments of the word ‘fantastique’), as the work was played on the radio that night and so grist to St Crustacean’s mill.

The album was released in 1996 on CD by Psychopyjama.

The lo-fi and playful approach to found sound displayed here found a small international audience, garnering comparisons to Vicki Bennett/People Like Us and John Oswald’s Plunderphonics. St Crustacean was a mainstay of the improv/electronic scene in Sydney in the late-1990s at venues like EAR at the Bentley Bar and the long-running Tuesday night Memory Loss at the Lansdowne Hotel, culminating in an appearance on the What Is Music stage at the Big Day Out in 1999 and a tour of Japan in 2000.

John E.’s Casio and fx rig now does time in his trio Espadrille, recordings of which can also be found through Psychopyjama.