I'll take this down immediately should a commercial interest ever occur, but I have no plans to release anything anytime soon as I work very slowly (due to RSI in both arms) and have no label interest whatsoever (not that this stuff would ever sell beyond a few hundred copies on vinyl). I don't even have a website for this stuff yet (again, RSI).

That being said...this is Kindermord. I'm trying to evoke a really depressing and claustrophobic period atmosphere through the use of wartime sound sources as far as feasible. Musically this is a form of 'industrial music' in the old sense, i.e. dark 'experimental' electronics. Probably not to many people's taste, best for listening on good headphones (the mastering, being amateurish at present, may produce ropey results on speakers, besides this being a kind of music best suited to headphones anyway).

Our Eternal Duty (zipped mp3 5.4MB)
A statement of profound historical pessimism...the 'war to end all wars' was anything but, the cycle goes on forever.

Flowers of Sulphur (zipped mp3 8.8MB)
The obscenity of gas warfare. Livens projectors fire en masse....flowers of sulphur will bloom upon your skin

Next up will be a piece about early tank warfare, which is partially return - to be titled 'The Green Fields Beyond'.

I'm most interested to hear what people familiar with the subject matter but not the style think of it (all of my current 'audience' to date (my friends) have been in the opposite position). Any hints on where to find WW1 period sound sources (especially the Kaiser, I only have one brief sample of him) also gratefully received.

Andi, the site below has some excellent sound files...

http://www.firstworldwar.com/

I'll look forward to giving the music a listen to later...am at work at mo

Rich

Ah yes, I've downloaded a lot of good stuff from there...that may in fact be where I got the Livens bombardment recording from.

The links won't load for me. Any suggestions?

Cheers
Kim

A couple of possibilities occur to me - do you have Winzip or equivalent installed (for opening .zip files)? Also, there may be an issue with the firewall on the network you are using.

What error message do you get?

No error message. Just a blank page for ages.

Cheers
Kim

Am at work so haven't tried downloading, but maybe right-click and "save as", then unzipping the saved files might work?

Alan

Ta, shall try that.

Cheers
Kim

Could well be firewall...if you're on a work network they may well have it configured to prevent you downloading big .zip files from obscure corners of the web.

Do try the right-click / save-as thing as well and see if that fixes it though.

Andi

I have listened to both peices and please forgive me if I warn pals of a nervous disposition not to listen to them and certainly not to do so late at night.

The reason I have given this warning is that it felt when I was listening to them that I had entered someone elses nightmare. Your mission was it seems to acheive this level of claustrophobic intimacy and you suceeded as you cannot get much more intimate than being trapped inside someones tortured mind, and by that I mean the tortured minds of the soldiers who experienced the war.

You call it dark electonic music i and this is a bit of a misnomer, it is beyond dark it is almost like looking into a blackhole.

The first piece is heralded by what sounded to my inexpert ears to be the opening bars to a New World Symphony by Dvorak and which if it was a really ironic statement.

Thankyou! This is precisely where I was aiming...the grim unvarnished truth (as far as can be determined, and expressed symbolically).

The tank track will try to express something of the horror that breathes from German accounts of facing early tank attacks...it's taking a long time, as there is a complex use of stereo involved.

Other tracks I am mulling over in my head include a subtle piece about mining and its detection (the faint digging sounds through the headphones gradually levelling up in stereo the way they would for the man at the listening post...distant sounds of panic and collapse...then a deafening blast) and a really slow, plodding symphonic piece full of wet squishing and gurgling sounds (Passchendaele).

I would like to release an album's worth on vinyl eventually...has to be vinyl, not CD, for the rougher analogue sound and archaic appearance.



Actually, this was created from part of the same period track ('The Trumpeter') as the voices used throughout.

Wow that was surreal!!!

I felt drawn along and into it, feeling the depths of despair.

In saying that, I enjoyed listening to it (only time or the first one 'Our Eternal Duty') - looking forward to hearing the second later this evening.

Reminds me very much of an old black and white film with some arty director putting futuristic music to it.

All you need to go with your music is a cracking video/suitable film - are you sure it should be in the public domain, don't you want to tout it to film makers?

PS: Anyone having trouble accessing them will need to right click and Save As - it worked for me!!

Like ghostly whispers of the terror and despair of war. I found that when playing "flowers of Sulpher" on Windows Media Player the visualisation "Alchemy" portrayed the music as flowers.......mainly yellow flowers. A most unusual sound not unlike Boards of Canada...but dark.....and scary. Thanks for the experience .....let us know when the new tracks are finished.

Futuristic? I consider it quite the opposite of futuristic...



I'm going to try to get it released eventually (when I have enough material), and then maybe play live with video backing, uniform and other gimmicks....if I can get a video artist to work with that would be ideal. In this style of music ('proper' industrial) the best you can hope for usually is to sell enough copies of the record to recoup the cost of pressing it eventually...maybe an edition of 500 (and reissue if there's enough demand). Gigs are considered a runaway success if the organisers don't lose money (been there, done that), even though artists often play for little beyond crash space and beer money. It's all done for the love of it.

I must say, I'm absolutely delighted with the response on here. This is the first time anyone outside my immediate circle of friends and music scene associates (none of whom are specifically obsessed with WW1, but all of whom are into this kind of music) has heard the Kindermord material, and I had no idea how people would react.

Thankyou, just what I was aiming at! I've had some creepy results from the visualisations before, but that's a great one...

Will keep you posted on new stuff. I will try and get a Kindermord site up when there's enough stuff as well. Obviously I won't put up every piece in full though as I will want to try and put out a release eventually (preferably vinyl, for the gritty old-fashioned sound and aesthetics...I'm already adding on 'gramophone noise' artificially).

Is Kindermord a German group??, is it music from an album??

I am of Anglo-German (specifically Saxon German, roots on that side are in the Zwickau area) ancestry, with relatives serving on both sides (I was brought up and live in the UK). The name is from the 'Kindermord bei Ypern' of 1914, and the idea being evoked is a wider one of the war as a 'massacre of innocents', a waste of a whole generation.

This is my hobby, and I work very, very slowly due to the nature of my compositional technique and the fact that I suffer from RSI in both arms due to working intensively in IT for years. Hence, there will be an album eventually (I hope) when I have completed enough material - likely a small edition (500-1000 copies tops) on a specialist industrial music label. To give you an idea of the size of the underground industrial music scene I inhabit, the largest relevant label / distributor in Europe who might be interested employs a massive two members of staff - while most of the labels (and nearly all of the artists) are in it purely as a hobby and simply try to avoid losing too much money in the process.

I slightly remixed 'Flowers of Sulphur' recently for the demo I'm putting together for the labels - the file at the link has been updated.