This spiel is in relation to the CPKHDF release “Like a Boss”, an 8-track album due for release on September the 4th 2020.

The lead track, “Beatings”, came together in light of our growing despair, frustration and anger. I don’t feel the need to expand on about what. It was pretty fatiguing to mix, and remains as such to listen to. I wanted to reference the hectoring, shrill timbre of 80s DIY punk / hardcore, combined with the three-legged, time-warping feel of Beefy and the broader avant-garde.

I remember once reading a Jack White interview where he said, referring to the White Stripes, that it was crucial to him that there was nothing about that band that could be construed as a joke. Eye of the beholder and all that, but that was /is on my mind. There’s a line between absurd and whimsy, my thesis being that the former has a tenable place in the discourse, the latter not so much.

I fret about it not being explicitly political. Not wanting to “preach to the choir” set against a gut feeling that there’s a responsibility on any of us with a web footfall in double figures or more to speak out at the moment. I take some comfort in being pretty sure that our political orientation is going to be implicitly obvious from the music. Is that privilege in action? Rhetorical question, but, I mean, Steve Albini never wrote an anti-Reagan song and we all knew where Big Black were coming from.

I’d (Craig) seriously and sincerely love to have a debate about this. A major stone in my shoe is my understanding that the propensity for the noisy/experimental scene to attract disenfranchised white males makes it a potentially rich recruiting ground for racist, sexist, LGBTQ+-o-phobes and their shit. I can’t cite a research piece, but it’s also hard not to speculate that the homogeneity of this (or any) scene is all to its impoverishment. School me about how we should address this @ShartedJeggings. Please.

The ‘band’: David and I (Craig) have (infrequently) bashed about doing music together for yonks now. Seems to work. Kerrie is a colleague of David’s. Kerrie and I have ‘met’ in that we got pissed in each other’s vicinity at a gig David and his brother Darren were doing, maybe a decade ago, I think tequila was involved. Everyone gets equal credit in anticipation of a track getting synced for a fucking toothpaste advert, a Merchant Ivory movie, or whatever.

All proceeds from this and anything else will go to the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (www.crer.scot) until the end of the year, or until proceeds exceed £500, whichever comes first.

Look after yourselves, and each other.

Craig x