EDWARD KA-SPEL
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Release date and tracklist
June 1, 1999
US 7″ Brainwashed BRAIN002
Credits
Notes
The second brainwashed 7″ single. Limited to 1,027 hand-numbered copies.
Yellow vinyl, comes with sticker and post card.
Cover Artwork by John Beck.
Postcard Artwork by Daniel McKernan.
EDWARD KA-SPEL
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Release date and tracklist
Limited to 70 copies in the following formats:
• 50 signed and numbered copies, each in a cloth bag with various inserts and a signed photo of Edward, and packaged in a wooden box held closed with cloth straps; the copies given to Edward for personal use also include ornate brass plaques and extra inserts.
• 5 copies with a melted vinyl record on the cover with wax dripped onto it.
• 15 copies in a regular cover, sealed with wax.
Available only via mail order, with each copy personalized on a unique insert stating “This box made for (name) on (date)”.
A CD-R or less limited (and less ornate) LP edition may follow. “I Can Cry If I Want To” was supposed to be titled “I’ll Cry If I Want To”, but was given the wrong title on the record insert by mistake.
EDWARD KA-SPEL
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Release date and tracklist
US CD Beta-Lactam Ring MT017
***
US 2xLP Beta-Lactam Ring MT017B
US 2xLP Beta-Lactam Ring MT017B- (Art cover)
***
10 August 2014
NL Enhanced MP3 self-released on Bandcamp
Credits
Notes
Tracks 1-8: Live in Nantes / Salle Paul Faure March 1998
Tracks 9-13: Live in Toronto / Music Gallery November 1993
LPs:
Track D1: recorded at Dolls House sometime in 1990.
Track D2 recorded at Dolls House sometime in 1991.
• 1st CD edition is limited to 500 copies, with the first 50 packaged in a cloth bag. Copies 51 – 500 packaged in a DVD case.
• Second edition (2001 CD) features cover artwork by LPD fan James P. Bergman. This edition was limited to 400 copies and packaged in a DVD case.
There were also 50 copies of this release pressed for the Legendary Pink Dots European tour in 2001. This version, according to Edward, was a small scale version of the first edition with the same cover.
• US 2xLP MT017B: Packaged in a cardboard box painted black with a paste-on cover and spine. Two LPs, the first on pink vinyl and the second on black vinyl, are packaged in a single handpainted jacket. Also included in the box are a slip of paper signed by Edward Ka-Spel and featuring the copy number; a spray painted puzzle, a vinyl sticker for Beta-Lactam Ring Records; a vinyl sticker for “Public Disturbance”; a single-sided, 8.5″ x 11″, b&w, ink jet printed insert with credits; a single-sided, 8.5″ x 11″, b&w insert with the text “edward ka-spel public disturbance” over a live photo of Edward; and a signed copy of the cover for the “Angelus Obscuros” CDR release. Limited to 100 numbered copies.
• US 2xLP MT017B-Art: Packaged in a cardboard LP mailer, tied together with a piece of yarn. Two LPs, the first on pink vinyl and the second on black vinyl, are packaged in a single handpainted jacket. Also included in the box are a slip of paper signed by Edward Ka-Spel and a single-sided, 8.5″ x 11″, b&w, ink jet printed insert with credits and the numbering. Limited to 3 hand numbered copies.
from Bandcamp: One of the earliest releases from the wonderful Beta-Lactam Ring Records. A plethora of special editions and the vinyl version (a double, hand -painted covers, in a serious pizza box) became quite a major rarity. All are long gone, but for the sake of posterity, here is an enhanced version of that vinyl edition. -EK
EDWARD KA-SPEL
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Release date and tracklist
March 21, 2000
US CD Caciocavallo CAD 2
28 June 2012
NL Remastered MP3 self-released on Bandcamp
Credits
Notes
CD: RED LETTERS is the latest solo album from EDWARD KA-SPEL; he hopes you will be sufficiently entertained.
Bandcamp: First Edward Ka-Spel solo of the series to be remastered. recorded in 1999 and bristling with pre-millenium tension. Nienke made the cover…
Press Release
RED. Passion. The sight of blood. Anger. Seeing RED. Impaled on the horns of a wounded bull. The bull impaled on a sword. Bleeding hearts. Roses. Car crash. Cover it up with a sheet. Kneel down and scrub it off the sidewalk, the sheets. Welcome to the real world. RED. Stop, or we’ll punish you. Stop, or you’re dead. RED. Poisoned rivers. A poison pen.
Teacher told me at school NEVER to write a letter in red ink, for the recipient will be utterly insulted. In England, we learn to keep our emotions under wraps in case we embarrass those around us. RED. Forbidden. Do not enter because it’s boiling up in here.
Review
The various reds of rage, love, apocalyptic prophecy, and taboo inform RED LETTERS, 2000’s song-cycle offering from the pen of Legendary Pink Dots frontman and tortured poet Edward Ka-Spel. Bobbing amid the album’s sad, sweet, slow-motion synth swells are some of the most forlorn and lonely words Ka-Spel has ever set to music. His familiar lost-in-space whisper seems content enough amid the star-streaked haze of the opening “Radio 6”; but RED LETTERS broadcasts a profound sense of alienation as it unfolds.Ka-Spel trudges with gloomy resolve through pretty but pained chord changes, a despondent song on his lips.
Dominated by candy-tone keyboards, hypnotic loops, and dazed chamber-music arrangements, RED LETTERS’ more mirthful moments recall not only the Dots’ first four full-lengths (as do most Ka-Spel solo albums), but also the late-’80s solo work of Wire’s Colin Newman. The mystical “Illumina 3/ The Carrier,” “Grooovy,” and the closing medley wind through sample-warped atmospheric fronts, brushing against trippy, dub-circus beats. “Seeing Red” stands out as RED LETTERS’ Ka-Spel classic, its obliquely doleful lyrics set to music of aching loveliness–including a memorable coda of psychedelic orchestration. –CDUniverse.com (?)
Lyrics
Radio 6
Did the planet cease to spin?
Did the world float before your eyes?
Forget to breathe? Believe what mother says…
It’s automatic.
Don’t allow your silly head to stray,
it’s useless.
You’re ok. Keep it in, there will be no shame.
I will make you proud
I’ll walk in this world
I’ll take you all those slings and arrows
I will make you proud
Thanks for your assistance,
Never thought I’d get so far.
If you’d asked me what would be back then, I would have laughed
And still I keep it in.
Still I keep them in.
They speak out when they are summoned, mother … I win.
They do what they are told…
This world of mine is completely in control.
Seeing Red
Slowed down to watch the accident in all its glory,
sure we hope no casualties are dangling from a tree
Now I promise I will now drive easy,
tuck this hulk behind a truck.
No squeezing into gaps that are not made for me,
please don’t worry baby, I’ll get you home…
Five miles back the queue was growing to a stop,
it spread like typhoid… Paris, Berlin, Rome, onwards to Bangkok.
The ‘copters dropping blankets, flying doctors,
there were sireds, night sky flashing blue and white.
Multilingual “Please stay calm…”
Don’t worry baby, I’ll get you home.
Armies dropped their weapons, flattened fields,
drove in convoys.
Over hills to dig them out, to cut them out.
Oh happy Christmas, war is over, there are pyramids
of bones along the road that stretches this way, that way…
Don’t worry baby.
Please stand up, women children first.
Wave your arms, we’ll get you home…
Red Rocks
It’s small, but it’s noble
All those running rats have names
They don’t get close to the table
We stay healthy
We are sane
Each flake that falls gets recycled
There is Harry S. Truman, there is Archangel Michael
It sure isn’t art but we’re sure that we like them
It’s home
I’m aware that you have a place for us
That’s double-glazed for us
Up there in the clouds
Let it go to someone that’s deserving
We’re unswerving
We’re home.
Belief on a Breeze
Reborn caesar spins a knife points towards the garden mutters, there we will
seed gethsemane anew, we’ll make the moves that were pre-destined, only this
time he’ll stay resting, He’ll be still. And after all these years we’ll be
free… Can you bring yourself to maybe trust in me? Respect these pure
intentions? This is destiny and I am just a player on the board.
Well recommend supervision, strict reclussion, here’s a pill to stifle those
delusions.. Be assured that we care, all we want is to see you well!
And reborn Caesar dies in flames, is born again, a slab, the cleaver
swinging in slow motion, but never strikes, cameras zoom in for a slice.
Listen to the hooded man shout “Destiny.”
We are merely players on the board.
The Carrier
Charm could be my middle name.
My calling card, my gift.
I claim you now, I reel you in
with tales that spin in wide-eyed wonder, then I sting!
You see, I just can’t help myself.
I have to be with people. I wish
you well with roses red, the thorns trimmed from the
stems, but I condemn.
I’ll plant them on your grave
my little friend.
I shall kiss your widow, tears
will flow but I will take her too.
I just can’t help myself. You see,
I know it and know that nothing lasts forever. I’m ashamed, but
that’s the way it is.
Swamp Thing
Swamp things acting restless
He thinks I am his mate
I bathed myself in coconut
and that’s his favorite plate
but why is he so reluctant?
Let’s get on with my fate.
Just can not stand the tension
was never one to wait
Get me down boy
down boy, down boy,
done!
Now I’ve achieved nirvana
those swamp things lie in hell,
except for my adversary.
… that smell!
The lord declared him blameless
He watched him from above. Descended, whispered gently:
“What you did you did for love.”
“So go forth and multiply.”
Child King
How lonely it feels…
I’d forgotten how to skate on my own wheels
Rolling south, down the hill – no destination.
This heart of mine burning in my mouth.
Watch them spring
Watch them fall, to please the king
He gets them all
Watch them spring
Watch them fall
He pulls the strings, he takes them all
The child king, the spoiled king
Changes made, changes missed
Well, I never kissed the limped wrist of he who has control
Humour me, I never sold my soul
It’s cheap, still not takers – but I’m trying…
And all the king’s horses
and all the king’s men couldn’t put this
back together.
They never can make amends
Wonder why you never get me on the phone?
I’m here…
Watch them spring
watch them fall
to please the king, he gets them all
Watch them spring
watch them fall
He pulls the strings, he takes them all
The child king, the spoiled king
EDWARD KA-SPEL
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Release date and tracklist
2001
UK CD World Serpent CHI01CD
11 March 2013
NL remastered MP3 self-released on Bandcamp
September 9, 2023
NL remastered MP3 self-released on Bandcamp
Credits
Recorded at Luxe: Jan-Sept 2001
Krzhyte Skreeë
From Bandcamp 2013:
First post-millenial solo album of EK .Fundamentally , a long suite of songs and scapes for the suite , “Our Captain’s Eyes” which clocks in at over 53 minutes. Recorded during a fruitful year when EK lived in Luxembourg.
Beautiful cover art is an original painting by Monadiki.
From Bandcamp 2023:
‘Caste o’ Graye Skreeens’ was the first album in a trilogy loosely alluding to seafaring adventures.
As a child I was a little obsessed by the legend of “The Flying Dutchman” and it was definitely at the back of my mind as this album from the the start of the millennium was painstakingly constructed.
The main piece ‘Our Captain’s Eyes’ pays tribute to Procol Harum’s ‘A Salty Dog’, a song that resonated deeply when I was young and makes me cry to this day.
Sadly “Caste” was seemingly doomed from the beginning. Perhaps the 53 minutes duration of the piece frightened people off but it was also one of the last releases by World Serpent before the company folded. Consequently it probably never reached a single shop. Nevertheless a couple of boxes of the original cd are in stock at Chez Dots.
The 2023 remaster splits “Our Captain’s Eyes” into five parts asI have to concede that my original concept was perhaps too extreme. The beautiful cover is an original painting by Monadiki.
Reviews
The bulk of Caste O Graye Skreeëns comprises the expansive ‘Our Captain’s Eyes’, based around a loose unstructured style where Edward Ka-Spel, frontman of the Legendary Pink Dots, lets his imagination run a playful course dropping in everything from ambient soundscapes, drum machines, dance beats, distorted noises and fragmented voices. Ka-Spel’s delivers his cryptic lyrics in his idiosyncratic sing – speak style, and via jaunty shanties over French horn. All points of Ka-Spel’s prolific musical career surface on this 50+ minute track – industrial, experimental, psychedelic and ambient music. Skreeëns is perfect for Ka-Spel’s debut World Serpent release as it shares many traits with David Tibet, and Steven Stapleton in traversing a peculiarly English outsider vision with a free-flowing range of sound and textures. – Compulsion Online
***
LEGENDARY PINK DOTS frontman EDWARD KA-SPEL has delivered a solo release for 2001 rather late, but the wait was worth it. Caste O’ Graye Skreens is a one-track CD with a multitude of songs or ‘movements’. The phases evolve over the course of 50-plus minutes from pulsating drum machine and vocal plays, creepy ambient horrorscapes, cut-up samples and distorted noises, familiar Ka-Spellian anthemic calliope music, and the occasional playful keyboard ditty. Various points seem to either hark back to the more sound-based (as opposed to song-based) LPD or pay tribute to Neu!, Residents, and the more experimental Pink Floyd era. – Ear/Rational.com
EDWARD KA-SPEL
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Release date and tracklist
30 May 2014
NL MP3 self-released on Bandcamp
Credits
Notes
Edition of 250 hand-numbered copies. CD is packaged in a plastic foldover case, with black and white two-sided insert and loose sticker.
Recorded live 16 May 1985 at The Paradiso, Tegentonen Festival in Amsterdam.
“The show was traumatic as I had a high fever and I was lying in bed unable to move an hour before appearing on stage. Add to that my only means of transportation to the concert was by tram (I was living in Amsterdam at the time). But despite this – maybe because of all this the show was a success” – Edward Ka-Spel 10 January 2001.
***
Notes from Bandcamp:
The doctor would have been furious if he’d been consulted. At 3pm on the day of this show EK lay on a bed, burning up with fever as the clock ticked on. Soundcheck was planned for 4pm- but a weak attempt to get up ended in embarrassing failure. 5 o’clock, 6 o’clock….wet flannels,paracetamol.
Finally the singer took a deep diseased breath and hobbled out of the door with a small keyboard under his arm. The Paradiso was a few stops away on tram number 9. When he arrived, his musical partner in crime, Hero Wouters was also looking a little unwell- it was like a wedding feast had been prepared, but the groom was missing. An important show too – part of the Tegentonen Festival.
Incredibly the show went on and under the lights the fever turned into a waterfall of sweat from the singer. It was like taking a bath.
The results were released on a hyper-limited cdr from Beta-Lactam Ring Records. Here it is once more.
Part 2 of this release is another Amsterdam show-this time from The Melkweg one year later where EK was together with Patrick Q.Wright onstage.
Reviews
If this recording of Edward Ka-Spel and Hero Wouters live in concert in Amsterdam’s noted/notorious Paradiso Club in May 1985 still sounds weird sixteen years later, just imagine what it must have sounded like then. Under a throbbing, scuttling digital percussion send off in post-Kosmische rhythm loops, surrounded by a whirl of effected keyboards and analogue lo-fi electronics, the contrast to the underground, let alone mainstream vocal synth music emerging at the time is still remarkable.
As Ka-Spel’s alternately disturbing and charismatic voice sweeps across the gamut of possibility the keyboard and drum machine offered in the mid-Eighties, several moods are proposed, offered, run through. Light and darkness of human emotions flow from the mournful optimism of “Even Now” to the duet with Bianca Wouters on “Hotel Blanc” where the misery of a lost and lonely man descends into spooked electronic treatments and babies crying. Low fidelity is not only a result of the relatively primitive technology, live sound and casette source, but is somehow redolent of an era at once so far away and seemingly close, when the echoes of Brecht, Dub, Minimalist electronic experiments and Situationism were a little fresher than the historical position in the post-Modern panoply they occupy today.
As a record of how the solo Ka-Spel material was performed live, Angelos Obscuros is a treasure trove of spot sound effects and crazy passages where the carnivalesque electonics and sampled song snippets collide in a manic tango or an immersive whispered existentialist story, roll over and unform themselves into a (sometimes even bouncy) song. There are moments of near Avant-Synth Poppery like “Spontaneous Human Combustion”, where the guest violin of Patrick Paganini floats in glory over strange pre-Housey keyboard stabs and in the distant echo-drenched arpeggiations of “Black Zone”. This is characteristic of his own material even more than of the Legendary Pink Dots performances at the time (and now) which tend to be relatively more song-oriented.
At the end, before the bizarre string-led observation of techno-prurience of “Love In A Plain Brown Envelope”, Edward asks hoarsly “Where have I gone? Ah, there I am”, and then proceeds to scream and moan around the tale of sexual dispassion and more-than-a-little-bit-Moroder synth pusles as Paganini strikes down with his bow to accompany fetishes for grannies and the antelopes of Lapland in a track The Dots still play live from time to time. With it’s long passages of hallucinatory collage and demented crooning, this session reeks of the atmosphere of how it was to be truly deviant in a Europe gone mad with the influences of free markets and dictatorial leaders; the escape from one cruise missile and privatisation nightmare into a personal paranoia of sound and despair banished by being made audible is almost tangible. -Antron S. Meister-
