SANDPAPER WAKEUP by KID SCISSORS // ALISHA KADIR

A collaborative EP the bones of which were produced through experiments with voice sampling.

My ambition for some time has been to make music by sampling sounds from real life: voices, rocks on wood, weird instruments etc. and arranging them in an interesting fashion. At least a third of this EP was made in this way.

As is the case with most things, accident often played more of a role than intent.

The spacey, verbed out sounds throughout are samples of my voice with some processing applied. A sound I was surprised to achieve myself.

Sandpaper Wakeup features what you may know (but I didn't) as a Zither or a guzheng in Chinese. Samples of which were recorded on a phone whilst passing a practice space for this beautiful yet impractical instrument as I passed whilst leaving my apartment to go to work on sleepy weekend mornings.

The voice between tracks 1 and 2 (including the cough) is that of my good friend Mr Nuts, proprietor of the now defunct bar 'Mr Nuts and the People'. Without a doubt my favourite ever name for a bar.

Guest Toothbrush may well be too long to tolerate entirely and is the most sparse of the three sonically. As far as I remember it is purely voice samples, bass and programmed drums. Of course, the vocals lend it ample life and this is the reason it remained so long.

There are some guitars on the last track which are tuned to a tuning which sounded nice at the time and I will probably never be able to recreate. Alisha also unleashes a hypnotic whirlpool of spoken word at this point.

All three tracks feature the vocals of Alisha Kadir, and were recorded in an afternoon in the basement of a house in Balsall Heath utilising a combination of my almost complete lack of direction and Alisha's astonishing ability to make anything sound good seemingly without effort.

Enjoy