If there was ever a rave in a bouncy castle...
Cactus Juice isn't a band, it's a name for all the bits and pieces I do that don't fit into any other project. I'm a musician, not an engineer, so no apologies for the sound quality.
Check out for an earlier, totally different experience of thrashy acoustics and overdriven mandolin.
Story behind the song
This is a tragedy. I met a guy called Mark, who wanted to engineer a song, and I had an idea I wanted to try out, namely putting folk tunes to dance beats. I put down the guitar part and Mark took it home, staying up all night, on one, writing the groove.
Next day and quite by accident we fell on the guitar loop and based the intro and linking sections on it. We put a lot of effort into getting the thing to flow right but it was no easy job getting the looped sections to match the folkier sections (and I don't think it's quite there). When we were happy, just to keep it real, the mandolin was recorded over the top in one take.
Mark then had the idea for the looped and layered mandolin at the end. The final mandolin loop is the middle section theme and variation played together, which I dreamed about that night. The slightly unsettling nature is due to them playing different scales, but so that adjacent notes don't coincide. This wasn't deliberate, just serendipity.
The tragedy is that right at the end of the session, the ADAT chewed up the master. All we had was a rough mix on a crappy tape, which is what you hear here. And then I accidentally deleted all the project files. Ironically, I was trying to back them up at the time...
However...!
Had this not happened, there would be no funny overdubs, which really give the piece a final polish. Yes, he does move in mysterious ways, doesn't he...
Lyrics
The words you hear are the result of happy chance born of disaster and are hardly edited. No prizes for guessing what they are but let me know if you work it out.
Personally, it reminds me of Hagar the Horrible.
