Oriental Land by Empty House

Check out video to Maoist Dub here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSErMVMMY4Y

Oriental Land will only be released through my Bandcamp page. It will be limited to 100 copies on CD and unlimited DL.

# CD FROM GLASS MASTER, NOT CD-R #

Oriental Land was recorded between March and April 2025 on Tascam 24trk, in a little box room, in a little town in a little corner of the North of England. All the songs were born out of improvisation or a bass line, and then built upon, but with one golden rule - not to exceed 8 tracks of instrumentation.

All the songs have dub elements, some more obvious than others. The idea was to work in the dub genre without resorting to true dub - kind of like a mutant strain, although a track like ‘Strong Arm Dub’ may be floating very close to ‘proper dub’.

Drum wise, I used a Stylophone Beat which was then overdubbed with electronic drum pads played in real time. These were fed through a 646 spring reverb, Dual Bi-Phase and the highly recommended Ras EFX handmade dub delay. The effects became instruments in themselves.

For the tracks ‘Sunburst Resonance’ and ‘Magnolia Murmurs’ I used the Suzuki electronic Taishogoto which I managed to get shipped from Japan, slipping under the radar of an import charge (lucky sod). A beautiful instrument, which is fun and rather easy to play despite tuning issues. Incidentally, the Taishogoto was used on the track Lieber Honig on Neu!’s 1972 debut album.

The title of the album ‘Oriental Land’ is a real place. It’s a park in the Qingpu district of Shanghai. It has a huge model aircraft carrier, modeled after the U.S Navy’s ‘Nimitz’ and a type 33 Submarine which visitors can tour. It became an obsessive point of my visits to China. not sure why for such an uneventful part of Shanghai. I finally cajoled the rest of my family to pay a visit. Yes, I’ll admit, the park wasn't much, but a little down the road, we came across the most lovely of fishing villages and an old Buddhist temple.

Oriental Land.

empty house is the solo work of Fleetwood based musician Fred Laird. Formed in March 2021, empty house is a musical project that fuses electronics, dub, drone and ambient. Buddhism, Clouds, literature, Martial Arts, sleeping all play a part in the themes of Laird's compositions.

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