I’ve been talking of holding a Séance for a while and I should clarify what this is all about, and what you can expect. While I’ve hoped for a clean break from the past, our audience isn’t ready and so I’ve sought to blend an identity – ‘Dogfood/Sevcom/Nilamox’. Severed Heads remains part of that history.
Early this year a call came from a local festival for Severed Heads to perform. The theme was the ‘sound of Sydney’. The band is really, honestly dead like 6 feet under dead, but a compromise could be that the dead be contacted from beyond the grave – an amusing idea at least. It being 2022 I thought it could be all music from 1982, a time when few had heard of SH, and thus free from nostalgia. It also spoke of Garry Bradbury who joined in the fun around that time. I started to collect all the backing tracks from these 1982 live shows. I requested the we play live in a museum. And waited for the go ahead.
They never got back to me.
Voices of the Dead
OK so let’s do it another way … in a séance you call up the spirits and they communicate through a medium. So let’s make it a live … er dead broadcast. The electronic ghosts will perform for an audience in pandemic style. You’ll get to hear and see a 1982/2022 show but it’ll be a spirit thing. That’s what happening and is pretty much ready to go later in the year on Bandcamp Live. September?
(Meanwhile there’s been a few calls for the band to play alive here and there in the world – sadly cannot be, cannot be.)
In the middle of all this I started a dialogue with the recently back-from-the-dead Futurismo label in the UK. They wanted a compilation, I wanted a re-visitation, we talked for a while and decided that they would do a 2LP of Bad Mood Guy first and see how we went with that. All being well we will come back to the larger project also called Séance. To what extent the music is recalled or remade is still a lively (or perhaps deadly) discussion.
Recent SH videos have been time locked to the images. That wasn’t the plan for Séance so the material is generally looser and unpredictable. When we lost the Sydney show we’ve simplified the equipment list so it’s a bit less fluid but accidents are still possible.
As we get closer to the day I’ll be promoting the specific time and date – I hope you can come see how we turn the tables!
