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SPECIAL NOTICE FOR OUR REGULAR CUSTOMERS : IF YOU BUY ANY SEVEN TRACKS FROM 'FREAK SCENE' HERE ON BANDCAMP (from either the Frizz Records or Silver Panda stores), WE'LL SEND YOU THE REMAINING THREE SONGS FROM THE ALBUM, PLUS THE ALBUM ARTWORK FREE OF CHARGE IN THE FORMAT OF YOUR CHOICE. JUST DROP US A NOTE WHEN YOU BUY THE SEVENTH TO LET US KNOW!

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We are THE SILVER PANDA

'You Made Me Realise' is the third of ten instalments of our debut album, entitled ‘Freak Scene’, which we're releasing song by song, one every two weeks over the next few months...

The album is a set of ‘weird covers’… The original versions were all recorded between ’88 & ’92, by bands that used guitar noise at the centre of their sound (call it grunge, art punk, indie rock, shoegaze, whatever) - Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Pavement, My Bloody Valentine… - and our versions strip away the dirt & the electricity, and reinvent what’s left with acoustic instruments, harmony voices, Latin percussion, jazz-inflected woodwinds… You’ll see…

The first two singles, our versions of Dinosaur Jr.'s 'Freak Scene' & Pavement's 'Summer Babe' are available from a sidebar near you >>>

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[Raphael Mann:]

“My group of teenage friends & I would go to see My Bloody Valentine play live at every opportunity in the late ‘80s & early ‘90s. Most often at the old ULU ‘school hall’, later graduating into bigger venues. It was probably the most reliably cathartic & transporting experience you could have at a gig… Wonderfully innovative and sensuous music played incredibly loud…

Through that time we followed their development of the breakdown section from ‘You Made Me Realise’ (a single ‘C’ chord strummed repetitively to build tension, before the main riff crushes back in), from the 40 second suspension of time that’s on the recorded version into a 20 minute or more situationist experiment in audience endurance… ‘The Death Chord’, as it became known… For how long and how loud could they pummel that single chord before there was no-one left in the hall…? (There was always someone left..and it was always us…hanging on for the ultimate release of that riff returning…)

When we came to record our version, of course we had to “do something” with that chord… We couldn’t just strum it for a bit on acoustic guitar and hope that it would be any kind of analogue of the original… We needed to be a bit more imaginative… What we came up with I think is probably one of my favourite instrumental passages on anything I’ve recorded…

The guitar keeps up a simple repetitive arpeggio, over which I improvised high register bass, weaving in & out of some polyrhythmic interplay on cowbell, hand drums & kalimba… There’s not much to it on paper, but it takes me somewhere…”