Pitchshifter independently reissued their major label debut “www.pitchshifter.com” this past Thursday, October 28th. It comes with a bonus demo of “Genius” and a previously unreleased instrumental track. The original version of the album was released on Geffen back in 1998.
This reissue came about as a passion project for frontman/programmer J.S. Clayden, who commented at length about it just ahead of its release:
“We’re pretty hyped to bring these materials to the Pitchshifter community. I literally found a DAT tape labelled “.com” demo in a box in the PSI Vault. I had to drive 50 miles to find someone with a working DAT player (I got rid of mine in the Mesozoic Era), rent it from them, drive it home and hook it up to the studio to see if the tape was what it said it was on the box (silently crossing my fingers that the machine wouldn’t chew the only copy if it was). Well, it really was the “.com” demo, 24 years old and still functioning, with unreleased tunes, different versions of album songs, et al!
For me, the tape gives a peek behind the curtain of where the band was at in 1997. Some of the songs are different to the final album versions—not necessarily better or worse, just different from not having yet been through the recording process with Machine. There are some different lyric and song structure choices, all of which show where the band was at in that moment.
Two of the most exciting elements for me are “Genius” and “Break Invaders”. Unbeknownst to anyone prior hereto, the original version of “Genius” had a pre-chorus lyric that tied the verse and chorus lyrics together to make sense.
That section was ultimately cut out in the album version (v3) for creative reasons; but it’s one of those things that always nagged at me—I always listen to the song and think “If it just had that section in it, people would understand the concept of the lyrics more.” Well, after two and a half decades, people can finally hear the song with that section in it (different packages have different “Genius” versions: v1 & v2).
“Break Invaders” was originally designed to be the bookend compliment to ZX81. It’s an instrumental tune that features 8-bit sounds of my fave video games from my misspent youth. Geffen panicked that they were gonna get sued by or Acclaim and so it was ultimately cut from the album version.
I was always gutted about that, aside from the buttloads of time spent creating the tune, I felt that its breakbeat/trip-hop style rounded out our influences in that area at the time (DJ Shadow/UNKLE, etc.), and that just having ZX81 made it seem like we were only interested in DnB outside of punk/metal; but I lost the battle to the suits.
I’m really happy to be able to share this tune with the Pitchshifter community after all these years—it should have been on the album, and now it’s finally coming home (little guy finally sticks it to the man decades later!).
I‘m also pretty excited about the artwork. The demo cover is the original image that we licensed for the album version prior to being worked on by graphic designer Howard Forbes and me. You can see that the coloring is different, and that the mum character has less distortion on her face.
Additionally, that original image cuts the dad character’s head off at the top, and so Howard had to manually recreate the top of his head and hair. That would be easy in 2021’ but in 1997, that would’ve been no mean feat in the Photoshop of the era (kudos to Howard!).
The on-body print for the demo is a Zip disc image—which is absolutely in keeping with what we were using at the time. Laughable now (your kids’ phones have more capacity), but accessible media of the era.
Certain versions of the Digipak CD also feature an obi strip (and some unique hand-created inserts—shhh), which was something that we were obsessed with at the time via collecting Japanese imports. We’ve also included period correct images of the time that you may not have seen before (along with some equipment images).
In terms of physical recording media, in keeping with the 1997 theme, it felt right to include DAT tapes and CD-Rs in some of the packages—both media types that we would’ve been using at that time. I created those items myself in the PSI Studio to ensure their authenticity. I wanted to have them come directly from us to the community.
The paintings are also something that I’m very happy to make available to the community. Some of you may know that I also make visual art outside of band covers, etc. I’ve always enjoyed creativity in various forms (are we all ready for the nest tour diary book yet?).
The paintings reflect one of the images on our “propaganda” flyers of the era (you may have one somewhere!), with the word “Genius” in Kanji on the forehead. They’re a decent size (24” x 30”) in acrylic on canvas. The execution is also designed to reflect the band’s MO of mashing influences together to create something unique: the background is freeform hand-painted with brushes, while the top image is spray-painted.
Each painting (there’s only two) is signed, comes with a digital certificate of authenticity (which is digitally assigned to the owner), and I also threw in an audio cassette mixtape and handwritten track listing of some of the stuff that I was jamming whilst I was writing the “.com” demo.
I’ve never done that before; but I thought that it might be interesting to listen to what we were playing in the back of the van and in the leaky garage that was PSI Studios in Nottingham whilst bashing away at “.com” tunes on an Atari 520ST hooked up to an Akai S1000.
I’d like to thank you all for the opportunity to keep the art of Pitchshifter alive through these band-direct releases. I’d also like to thank Hassle Records for their partnership in negotiating with the majors to make this release possible.
Although we create these campaigns to meet the community’s expressed desire for new and unique materials, doing so does come at a cost (it ‘aint cheap to get short-run custom products made). Thus, we understand that these packages may too expensive for some members of the community.
If that’s the case for you, I’d encourage you to purchase the Hassle Records version of the “.com” re-release vinyl. They have some reasonable options (with or without t-shirt, etc.) that might work for you.
However, if you do have the wherewithal, we’d appreciate your support with this band-direct “.com” campaign. I’m obviously not going to keep finding 24-year-old demos down the back of the couch. This is a very special and unique occurrence that we’re happy to share with you all. It’s been a lot of fun (and work!) getting these packages together, and we hope that they will give some of you as much joy to own as they have given us to create.
Peace! JS & Pitchshifter.”
The vinyl run managed to sell out promptly via Bandcamp (Hassle Records still have copies of their pressing available here as of press time.) Unfortunately, a digital edition of this take on the outing isn’t expected to be made available, as the band stated:
“Digital access to this album is only available as a free courtesy to the collectors who purchase the physical versions. To keep the major labels from suing us, we’ve intentionally made the digital version a stupid price to discourage anyone buying it as a standalone (because the Bandcamp platform won’t let a band “hide” a digital release tied to physical product). So just buy the vinyl and save a fortune :-)”
