Rotating Knives by Pantomime Horse

Pantomime Horse is Joe Funk and Mick Peters.

We met in 2001, at the formation of the Austin based Prog band Thirteen of Everything https://thirteenofeverything.net . Twenty years later, with a pandemic lockdown and Joe finally returning from several years in the wilderness (Florida) we put together this project to preserve what little sanity remained.

A Pantomime Horse is an English invention, to provide manageable equine presence for theatrical purposes. It involves two persons disguised in a costume and is both comedic and poignant. It is left to the listener to decide which of us is the arse end.

The album, as is often the case, evolved into something rather different than the original concept, (which was acousticky, Sticky, and mostly instrumental). In particular, once we heard Abby's spine-tingling vocals on "Fragments" we quickly added lyrics to several other tracks. We did though, stay away from drum samples, click tracks and other computerized augmentation (mostly).

It's been a lot of work, but very rewarding. Time will tell whether this horse makes another appearance in the pantomime, but it seems quite likely.

Mick Peters: Originally from Birmingham, England, I started playing bass and guitar at age 14 but my music career only really took off after moving to Austin in the mid 90's. I spent a couple of years in a band called "Speedlimit and the Violations", lead by Marvin the scrap-dealer, before meeting "Diamond" Simon at an open mic. He invited me to join "Diamond Simon and the Roughcuts", an established blues/RnB band with a 3 piece horn section. After several years of weekly 2am finishes, we were pretty burned out. I was also rather tired of having a trombone in my left ear - those things are loud.
While waiting to get into a King Crimson "Projeckt" show in 1999 I met one Ted Thomas. We exchanged emails, one thing led to another, and just under a year later, Thirteen Of Everything was born (thirteenofeverything.net). In 2001 we met Joe, who joined the band shortly thereafter. This, at last, was the opportunity to write and play Progressive Rock. 20 years later, ToE is still going, recording our third album.
For the last 15 years I've also played in Flying Pig - a fun cover band that has played frequently around Austin (at least we did, pre-COVID). In exchange for playing some country, I get to play a few Pink Floyd and Radiohead songs.
Pantomime Horse grew out of the combination of Joe's return from Florida and the COVID lockdown. Rotating Knives was recorded, mixed and mastered at the Serena Studios (ie. my house) using Logic plus a ton of plugins, mics and other gadgets. Most of the tracks were freshly written, in various combinations and mechanisms of collaboration, although Fragments and parts of Last Wish were based on pre-existing ideas.
People write and play music for a variety of reasons - fun, money, sex, drugs - but for me the most important thing has always been the connections and interactions with my bandmates, being greater then the sum of the parts, so working with Joe on this project during the long days of lockdown has been a real joy and a sanity-saver. I think we produced some good music too!

pantomimehorse.org
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