Antenna Farm have been active since late '98. They started out as an improvising turntablist unit, mashing together other people's records, using CDJs and occasionally also guitars, radios, etc. After investing in a Zoom Sampletrack, Atari/Cubase, and Minidisc, they moved more & more into creating their 'own' material (less reliant on others' sources). The cusp of this period saw them collaborating live with their friends V/Vm and getting their first tracks released (two tracks on FatCat sampler CDs, and a remix of "Goodiepal" on the Danish label, Hobby Industries).

Since then, they have continued to update their set-up, and to gig throughout Europe (including collaborations with Main, Nish and Icelandic guitarist Petur Hallgrimsun). A collaborative project with Main will be appearing on Staalplaat in the summer of 2001. Other releases have included a track on the much-lauded ERMX 7" Series (FatCat), and tracks on compilations on Diskono, RKK, and Lo Recordings.

The music draws on, and is heavily influenced by, their surrounding environment (and, specifically living in Brixton, South London.) Both sounds and ideas are gathered from the street and from walking around London - noise, mess, graffiti, decay, paranoia, mad sprawl, etc. Much of the source material they work with comes via location recordings. Alastair is responsible for recording and compiling the recent One Amazing Day CD on V/Vm (sounds he recorded whilst working on construction of the Millennium dome). When they play live they usually explore the town in which they are playing, taking recordings from various locations, and then morph them together with pre-programmed and synthetic sound.

The work on the Phthalo CD was taken mostly from pre-existing structures and material, then broken apart and put back together to reinvent new, fractured forms. Sometimes forcing two different rhythms/constructions into the same space, sometimes pulling the material apart to the point of collapse, then inserting guitar sounds; playing the springs of an old reverb unit with the casing removed; shorting out simple electrical circuits and dirtying signals; recording radio static and VLF radio signals and feed back loops through effect units. Some of the tracks were recorded by transposing 'raw material' on to a hard disk recorder then editing and multi-tracking, some were generated from recordings being heavily manipulated with digital signal processing and some were real-time recordings using turntables, samplers, CDs and mini discs whose playing surfaces were interfered with.

Discography:

"Copenhagen Mix" (Antenna Farm^Jansky Noise live) on Structure Decay sampler CD, FatCat, 1998 (no cat. no.)

"Prowler Reconstruction" on Passageways sampler CD, FatCat, 1999 (FATP01)

"Macro Collaps" remix of "Goodiepal" 12", Hobby Industries, 1999 (HI002)

"Ambush Emiliana" remix, split 7" with Motion, FatCat, 2000. (284TP7)

"Gallery Hack" on Naked & Alone On The Celebrity Circuit CD, Diskono, 2001

"Cracked" on Fresh Fruit CD, Lo Recordings, 2000

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For more information please contact Lynn Hasty at (323) 466-5141 or lynn@greengalactic.com.