| | 5:05 AM - "Everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm" www.thesoundof.mu by Strictly Kev and Mr Trick
About three years ago a website appeared at the address www.thesoundof.mu with images of various famous sites - Stonehenge, Easter Island, the Pyramids - featuring the KLF's famous 'T speaker' from their 'White Room' era. Embedded in the sparse and cryptic pages was the 'soundtrack' to a supposedly forthcoming DVD documentary called 'The Sound of Mu(sic)'. The site disappeared at some point in 2007 and hasn't been seen or heard of since - until now.
I have to hold my hands up, along with my good friend Mr Trick and say, "It's a fair cop Guv, it was us what dunnit". Sorry to disappoint the few who actually thought it was the KLF (and there were some - and also a couple who were disappointed when they found out it wasn't them) although any hardcore KLF fan knows that they would never do a thing like this. Or would they... That's an endless debate for another day, the reason I'm revealing this little scam (sorry Bill and Jimmy) is that it was cut off in its prime and now is the time to finish it.
But going back to the beginning: when it first appeared KLF fans took a little while to find it, but eventually it climbed up the Google pages. Keen-eyed page refreshers found that the intro image contained random messages that changed each time you clicked on the site. Announcements ranged from "Warning! This is still not the White Room" to "Lord, Now is the Time". The most cryptic was "KLF info sheet 5 is not thought to exist - JAMS CD8". This was a reference to the info and press releases that the KLF issued in their lifespan, No.5 mysteriously never made it and the last CD they released was JAMS CD7 whilst ours was CD8. I was really getting into the minutae of the band's history here, picking over the smallest crumb to act as a signpost for true fans to make a connection whilst introducing subtle wordplay and imagery that could well have been part of the JAMMs/KLF mythos.
..
When you entered the site proper you were redirected to a separate window with the legend "The hills are alive..." and an image of the T speaker sharing the hillside at Easter Island. If you laid the cursor over the three dots after 'alive' you got a link to another page: this time, jet fighters flying over a giant 'Justified' pyramid and "...with the sound...". Further dot-browsing turned up another link to a final page - the T speaker amid the kind of hilly meadow Julie Andrews would have frolicked in and the line, "...of Mu(sic)" along with a tracklist.
This was embedded with all sorts of teasers that would tickle any red-blooded KLF fancier; references to 'Mu Mu County' and 'The Black Room' - unfinished but existent KLF material - as well as 'K Cera Cera', their anti-war anthem. Punning abounded as well with 'What Time Is Lord?' (geddit?) and '3am, Echo Beach' - Jimmy had recently remixed the Martha & The Muffins classic. Below all this was the line, "Scenes from the forthcoming documentary 'The Sound of Mu(sic)'". In the middle of the lower speaker was a pulsing red woofer cone which, when clicked, took the user to a 30-minute mp3 download of the 'soundtrack', an ambient collage similar to KLF classics like 'Chill Out' and 'Waiting (for) The Rites of Mu'.
Among fans all over the world, this provided much forum debate, everywhere from mash up message boards to dedicated KLF sites, even one from Israel. Some swore it was by a group of German fans, others claimed it was just 'Chill Out' remixed with a few new bits. Some tried to trace the source of the site and deduced that it was from the States (it wasn't) and one got excited when he found it was registered under the name 'Penkiln Burn' (Bill Drummond's publishing company).
Comments ranged from "Whoever is responsible... it sounds like they got hold of the KLF's source material...", "I hope this gets released!", to "It really could mean that they are back?", "Even titles of the pages on the site put together state: available soon, jams CD8". The Hedphonesex blog said, "... even if this is the doing of some fakers / fans it's a worthwhile piece of work." Mark Emsley from ireallylovemusic wrote, "someone doing a great rip off or there are stirrings in the KLF/JAMMS world". DJ Hickory Dickory Doc (before I even knew him, it's such a small world - we truely are musical soul brothers) said, "Whoever made this mix did it in a good marketing way so that it looked like something the KLF would have released but did not". He also spotted Mr Trick's Beach Boys inclusion as not being from any original KLF material too.
This 'original' composition by Trick had kicked off the whole idea in the first place. He had made an ambient version of the Beach Boys' 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' in the style of the 'Chill Out' album. This was complete with sheep effects and all manner of other found sounds and he mailed it over to me for use in a mix I was doing in a similar manner (originally for Solid Steel). We slipped this 'unreleased' gem into the rest of the KLF material and only a few picked up on it as not being part of their musical output in the past. Also I couldn't resist using 'The Sound of Music's' famous 'the hills are alive, with the sound of mu...', cutting it off before it finished and alluding to the JAMMs' publishing credit on early records. This just fitted with the Easter Island imagery, like a jigsaw puzzle and we had more and more fun piecing the 'story' together.
One enterprising / cheeky fucker even downloaded it all and sold a mocked-up copy on eBay for £40, claiming he'd got it at a record fair! Unfortunately he emblazoned KOPYRIGHT LIBERATION FRONT across the top of the cover in the wrong typeface, ruining all my hard work and making it look just like a bootleg.
All the images I'd compiled for the site had been intended to look as though they could have been real, either in a KLF project past or in some fanboy fantasy of the future. We made the site as fans of what had been and what could have been, because the KLF had something so good going and they cut it off at its peak. It was exactly the right time for them to have done so because they ensured there would never have been any chance for them to go downhill, get stale or disappear into irrelevance. They were there and then they were gone - if only more groups had their courage... The downside of this however is that many fans didn't have any, for want of a better word, 'closure' on the band, leaving so many questions, "what ifs?" and unfinished projects behind to be pored over, unravelled and expanded upon. It was these fragments that we used as material to both authenticate and entice people in to the site. The mix contained a section of the unfinished 'Black Room' album, numerous sounds buried deep within lesser-known remixes and even a cameo from the late John Peel exclaiming "Is it the KLF or isn't it?". I had, in fact, made up proper CD artwork whilst making the website images which was later visible on the second 'burning' stage of the project.
A few months later new images replaced the old, this time with the theme of burning prevalent as with the K Foundation's million pound arson stunt. Images of burning 'Sound of Mu(sic)' CDs and LPs, echoing the back cover of 'Who Killed The JAMMs?' featured with the lines "Burnt Offerings..." and "1 Million Pounds Can't Be Wrong" (an Elvis reference). The main site images were replaced with two Stonehenge images and a final burning T speaker completing the phrase "Lost in Mu(sic)", "Caught in a trap...", "...no turning back". The strapline again declared 'Scenes from the forthcoming documentary...' with 'Soundtrack available now at www.thesoundof.mu'. Oh the anticipation!. I once arrived at the Ninja Tune office to find an employee with the Stonehenge image I'd created as the desktop image on his Mac and had to keep a straight face when I asked about it and he replied that he was looking forward to the documentary.
Sadly that never came to pass, the reasons being twofold: the site was registered in Mauritius so that we could get the '.mu' ending to the URL and the country had recently changed the way it handled its domain name. This meant that everything with a .mu domain went offline and the process of getting it back online was tenuous at best and initial enquiries were met with silence. Finally an email promised a return to normal service at some point but that was vague and time was running out.
The second reason was that there was to be a third and final part to the 'project': firstly there would be a new change of images at the site, a solitary opening page with the line '2007 - What the Fuck Is Going On?'. Now, any KLF/JAMMs fan will see the significance of this as it's 20 years since this immortal phrase was first issued - obviously as '1987 - What the...' - and the site going down only added to the situation as those paying attention would have been thinking of this fact.
Lastly, we were going to print up large flyposters of fake release ads for the "documentary", have a friend post them up around certain media hotspots in the capital and photograph them for the site. The thinking behind this was that if people saw images of actual posters they would start to believe that there really was a film coming out. Then maybe the media would jump on it and we'd have a good laugh as they chased a non-existent film.
I made around 20 variations on different designs for potential posters, which are being shown here for the first time. These had mildly provocative straplines like, 'Burn The Beat' and 'Burn The Bastards' (after their old single), plus 'Adding Fuel To The Fire' and 'No Turning Back...'. They were all meant to look like scenes from a film, snapshots for promo purposes or frames from a trailer. These are the ones I was most happy with and three were earmarked to be printed up for the final phase.
Then life got in the way, both our partners gave us children and the poster thing was put on the back burner. Then the site disappeared. It's a shame it didn't all happen as we'd hoped but we hadn't actually worked out what we were going to do for the encore, after the poster images had gone up and (hopefully) the web was buzzing about this impending film. I guess we would probably have made it up as we went along, much the same as Bill and Jimmy did, but it was fun to play at being the KLF for a while.
Postscript:
Whilst creating all these images I made many others which weren't as successful and didn't make the grade of authenticity I was looking for. Again, these have never been seen until now...
 
Post Postscript:
I initially made the mix for the radio with several spoken word sections from interviews with Bill Drummond talking about his past with the KLF. I took these out when we decided to do the site as they would give the game away too easily as the KLF would never have done such a thing. Here is a link to an mp3 of the ' vocal version' of the mix, unheard until now.
Also here is a downloadable pdf mini book of all this material and more with the full story - best viewed in full screen mode in Acrobat
Happy Xmas :)
Strictly Kev and Mr Trick |
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