FanTom Voices |
ABPRAR 002T |
Voices is FanTom's first filk tape, which is the fruit of a project
he's been nursing for years. It was released at Nycon 8
at the end of October 1998.
Tom had painted the artwork (shown here) a while before in acrylic paint. I scanned it in and did the rest of the inlay card design. Cover art © 1994 Tom Nanson. This tape took two recording weekends and a mix-down weekend, if I remember aright (it's all a bit of a blur...). Zander Nyrond had prepared a number of sequenced accompaniments for many of the songs. He had emailed them to me as MIDI files, and I had converted them to suit my sequencer software, so that in theory I could just attach Zander's U220 synth module to a MIDI cable and all would be well. I say in theory.... In the end, all was nicely recorded. As you can tell from the sniggering at the end of the Dwarves Song, we had a lot of fun. Too much, maybe. (Nay!) My own personal highlight was recording Tim Walker's trumpet for the song "N'Mork Morvarn". He and I were left to it, and we figured out how to do punch-ins on my 8-track recorder, and it was just great.
Mix-down was straight-forward; and we had fun getting the reverb
settings right for the "Dwarves Song" and "Watchman's Lament". The resulting
minidisc went (as usual) to Stewart Orr, and in due course I delivered a hundred copies
of Voices to Tom at the Nycon.
BUYING THE TAPETom asks me to invite you to call him at home on 0181 540 0336 (that's +44 181 540 0336 when calling from abroad) and talk to him or his answerphone. It's a close call as to which will respond in the sillier manner...
Unless he's feeling exceptionally skint, he'll be charging you £6 for a copy. The good news is, you get a free lyrics book with it. (The lyrics book is indeed puchaseable separately. As it is written, "Two cupro-nickel pound coins of the realm, or one double angel, or Melnibonian wheel of the same value, effendi, will purchase this most marvellous and erudite volume of verse, skilfully bound in genuine card and illuminated near fabled Guildford." So now you know.)
Here's the tracklist of FanTom Voices. For more details, see the liner notes... which means you'll have to buy it!
Side A
Side B
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