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March 28, 2024, 11:47:51 AM

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Artists that never existed / bullshit backstories

Started by Gregory Torso, March 04, 2021, 10:22:12 PM

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Gregory Torso

I've been enjoying the soul-tenderising drones and pulses of Abul Mogard (for your listening reference - Slate Coloured Storm & Above All Dreams) ever since a friend sent me a couple of records and so, wanting to find out more about him, I used the internet.
I found something about him being "a retired Serbian factory worker trying to recreate the sounds of his working life through synthesisers" and immediately thought "oh bollocks is it", and this lead me to a pretty interesting article here - https://www.loudandquiet.com/interview/the-legend-of-serbian-factory-worker-abul-mogard-and-other-cult-origin-stories/, about (mainly electronic/experimental) artists using made-up backstories and soubriquets and that.

I suppose most people here know about the Conet numbers stations project, and I remember a while ago reading that that was all a hoax using radio interference and computer text to speech programs. Not sure. I think numbers stations probably are/were an actual thing, but, who knows.

Additionally to things mentioned in the article (Jurger Miller was one I knew), there were also the fake wax cylinder recordings of Wilhelm Kleinbach (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIjFd9ThW4Q), the fake Thai pop band Neung Phak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_jyZrd7M6g),  Robert Pollard trying to pass this admittedly amazing song as "totally a long lost 80s new wave band from Ohio that sounds just like Guided By Voices!" etc etc

I'm sure there must be lots of other examples of bands that never were, who's YOUR favourite?

sevendaughters

I've never heard about the Conet Project being a hoax! Makes sense because they protect their copyright quite strongly (ie. suing Wilco).

Absorb the anus burn

The Comic Jokers. Unscrupulous mogul records jam sessions fuelled by LSD and releases 5 LPs worth of material without the musicians consent or knowledge.

Gregory Torso

Quote from: sevendaughters on March 04, 2021, 10:24:54 PM
I've never heard about the Conet Project being a hoax! Makes sense because they protect their copyright quite strongly (ie. suing Wilco).

Yeah, I think I heard about it from Keith Fullerton Whitman when I used to order records off him. I suppose it wouldn't be difficult to make your own 'numbers station recording'.

purlieu

Porcupine Tree started out as a fictional '70s prog band, with a full bio and all that.
XTC tried to do that with Dukes of Stratosphear, although Virgin completely fucked it up (then wanted to return to it for the second Dukes album, managing to totally miss the point again).

FSOL have a ludicrous number of aliases, among them is Yage, their 'engineer' who, early on at least, was purported to be a real person. They have a couple of tracks produced by 'Luco' (an alias created for those two credits), and stories on their website and in their liner notes and books reference other fictional characters such as Philip Pinn (the name comes from the manager of the building their old studio was in, Nick Philpin), while Yage, when referenced in text, can refer to either of them or even their graphic designer, Buggy G. Riphead. One of their albums was "recorded at The Analogue Room, produced by Philip Pinn", neither of which exist. In the pre-internet days, it definitely felt like they had a big team of friends and collaborators and added a certain level of mystery.

The whole post-vaporwave scene centred around Dream Catalogue is chock full of this stuff, but a) most of it pretty naff and unoriginal, and b) they're a bunch of right wing cunts, so we won't discuss them.


Absorb the anus burn

Dove The Band Of Love. (Devo supporting themselves as a preppy pro-Reagan Christian band).


Absorb the anus burn

The artists on the Psi-Fi label (Cosmic Corridors / Galactic Explorers etc.) were not mysterious lost Krautrock bands, but cleverly produced fakes recorded in the mid 90s to cash in on the growing interest in kosmische.

daf

Come, Come, Come To The Sabbat . . .

Early 70's Occult proggers Dodo Resurrection - who imploded shortly after recording the legendary debut album 'Nostradamus'



Completely made up article in an early 90's Record Collector - pre-internet, so I was completely taken in!

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Stupid young person that I was, when I bought a Count Five CD* in the early '90s, I took the mind-boggling liner notes at face value. They were written by an amphetamine-addled Lester Bangs in the '70s, his biography of the band was a fantastical work of fiction.

That one-shot gang of suburban garage-dwelling teenagers didn't actually go on to record a sprawling psychedelic masterpiece with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Damn you, Bangs.

* They have no good songs apart from Psychotic Reaction.

Phil_A

Quote from: Gregory Torso on March 04, 2021, 10:22:12 PM
I suppose most people here know about the Conet numbers stations project, and I remember a while ago reading that that was all a hoax using radio interference and computer text to speech programs. Not sure. I think numbers stations probably are/were an actual thing, but, who knows.


Fairly sure The Conet Project didn't invent number stations, there's enough evidence to confirm they're a real thing still used by intelligence services all over the world. Shortwave enthusiasts had been recording and tracking them for years before that lot decided to cash in.

Gregory Torso

Yeah, I didn't mean that numbers stations were a hoax, just that the Conet release was.

Ptolemy Ptarmigan

The Fraternal Order of the All recorded only one album in the Sixties.

Colin Allcars - vocals keyboards guitars drums
Gene Pool - ditto
Jimmy DeLocke - ditto
Kid Willy - ditto
Ed Twiddle - maracas

An obvious influence on The Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-icawyoymg

The Beach Boys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUW3XfgWk8A

The Byrds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSlhE8lSEeM

The Doors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_beRH2TY2Nk

Joe Oakes

Made me think of all the fake musicians on Spotify, which mainly exist to prevent real musicians getting paid, and Spotify is in on the scam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whQ8UBoz-To

jamiefairlie

Weren't "I Dream Of Wires" an invented band, by NME?

Yussef Dent

Quote from: Phil_A on March 04, 2021, 11:34:04 PM
Fairly sure The Conet Project didn't invent number stations, there's enough evidence to confirm they're a real thing still used by intelligence services all over the world. Shortwave enthusiasts had been recording and tracking them for years before that lot decided to cash in.

I used to listen to them as a kid as shortwave on my Panasonic boombox fascinated me, pre-internet so it was so weird to hear radio like The Voice of Russia and so on as to what was going on in the world. I had no idea what the weird numbers stations were so I asked my grandad who was my human wikipedia at the time, but even his explanation of them being station placeholders was wrong. Only found out what numbers stations did years later after seeing an article about The Lincolnshire Poacher one. I still listen to shortwave using online tuners known as WebSDRs, one based in Twente and one based in Ohio so you've got a decent coverage of the globe. Numbers stations are still prevalent although not as much and will always sound weird as f***, I still do like it when I come across one just to think "only one person in the world knows what this means and is listening to it now." I should really do a Soundcloud of the stuff I've found, one of the best being a Russian pirate radio station of a guy sounding hammered but having the time of his life badly playing what sounds like a Bontempi organ and heartily singing along.

Staying on topic, Sandi Thom's webcasts which would have been very, very difficult to broadcast back then to the online audience she was supposed to have is one, it was all total bollocks. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2008/may/20/cansandithomoutmanoeuvrea

BeardFaceMan

Wasn't there a metal band recently who did something similar? Fooled a load of journos, booked a full headline tour and everything and it was just one bloke?

Quote from: jamiefairlie on March 05, 2021, 05:32:47 AM
Weren't "I Dream Of Wires" an invented band, by NME?
Yes, they ran weekly stories about them for a few months until they had them killed off in a coach accident whilst on tour in Europe.
There was also Terminal Crash Fear in the Melody Maker.

buzby

Quote from: Gregory Torso on March 04, 2021, 10:22:12 PM
I suppose most people here know about the Conet numbers stations project, and I remember a while ago reading that that was all a hoax using radio interference and computer text to speech programs. Not sure. I think numbers stations probably are/were an actual thing, but, who knows.
The Conet Project is a compilation of recordings of real numbers stations that were made by London-based writer, artist and radio ham Akin Fernandez between 1992 and 1997, when numbers stations were just dropping off from their peak. As Phil said, stations like The Lincolnshire Poacher, Swedish Rhapsody and  Cherry Ripe that appear on the album were all well known to radio hams and their schedules had been extensively documented. In the Lincolnshire Poacher's case they even managed to triangulate the source transmitter to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.

Fernandez set up his own indie label called Irdial to put out a compilation of his recordings in 1997 and periodically had small pressing runs made to sell to other enthusiasts. The last pressing he made was in 2001, after which he made the recordings available free to download as MP3s. However, the recordings were still under mechanical copyright, so when bands started sampling them without clearing them he pursued them, hence the case against Jeff Tweedy.

The whole story is covered in this Washington Post article from 2004:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35647-2004Aug2.html

Back to the topic, the whole Kalevala label and it's releases that were cooked up by Bill Drummond and Mark Manning to accompany their Bad Wisdom book, which were recorded with session musicians in Helsinki.

lb99

Quote from: buzby on March 05, 2021, 09:09:19 AM
The Conet Project is a compilation of recordings of real numbers stations that were made by London-based writer, artist and radio ham Akin Fernandez between 1992 and 1997, when numbers stations were just dropping off from their peak. As Phil said, stations like The Lincolnshire Poacher, Swedish Rhapsody and  Cherry Ripe that appear on the album were all well known to radio hams and their schedules had been extensively documented. In the Lincolnshire Poacher's case they even managed to triangulate the source transmitter to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.

Fernandez set up his own indie label called Irdial to put out a compilation of his recordings in 1997 and periodically had small pressing runs made to sell to other enthusiasts. The last pressing he made was in 2001, after which he made the recordings available free to download as MP3s. However, the recordings were still under mechanical copyright, so when bands started sampling them without clearing them he pursued them, hence the case against Jeff Tweedy.

The whole story is covered in this Washington Post article from 2004:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35647-2004Aug2.html

Back to the topic, the whole Kalevala label and it's releases that were cooked up by Bill Drummond and Mark Manning to accompany their Bad Wisdom book, which were recorded with session musicians in Helsinki.

A lot of the recordings were actually made by a shortwave radio enthusiast called Simon Mason, not Fernandez. I interviewed Mason in Hull many years ago for a documentary I started making (and never finished). I think he sold his recordings to Fernandez, not really knowing how popular they would be.

buzby

Quote from: lb99 on March 05, 2021, 09:25:36 AM
A lot of the recordings were actually made by a shortwave radio enthusiast, not Fernandez. I interviewed the enthusiast in Hull many years ago for a documentary I started making (and never finished). I think he sold the recordings to Fernandez, not really knowing how popular they would be.
Yes, there was a tape trading scene amongst radio hams regarding recordings of the stations, which he took advantage of (he had previous form for using 'found media', with his exhibition of prostitutes phone cards and the accomanying book). However, I don't think Fernandez actually made that much money from the original release though, it was only when bands started sampling them that he cashed in.

JaDanketies

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on March 05, 2021, 06:20:01 AM
Wasn't there a metal band recently who did something similar? Fooled a load of journos, booked a full headline tour and everything and it was just one bloke?

That was Threatin. His brother is actually in a black metal band with an actual following called Thy Antichrist. Threatin did a comeback tour recently that had a couple of meme-lovers in attendance (according to reports).

JaDanketies

Nattramn

The sole creator of Death - Pierce Me by Silencer - one of my fave depressive black metal releases with vocals that made me piss myself with laughter the first time I heard them - and Diagnose: Lebensgefahr ‎- Transformalin - one of my fave industrial / dark ambient releases.

The story is that he chopped his hands off and replaced them with pig hands. Also that he was in a mental hospital and escaped and attacked / murdered a child with an axe.

Here's a picture of him with the pig hands.




Here's a blog post going into full detail about his likely-bullshit backstory.

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: JaDanketies on March 05, 2021, 09:43:08 AM
That was Threatin. His brother is actually in a black metal band with an actual following called Thy Antichrist. Threatin did a comeback tour recently that had a couple of meme-lovers in attendance (according to reports).

Ah yes, that's the chap. Lovely quote from his brother here -

Quote
"While [Jered] may try to spin all this as an elaborate hoax of sorts, I can assure you, knowing my brother, that this indeed was a failed attempt at entering the music industry."

phantom_power

Not sure it quite fits into this thread but there were some covers of Bowie songs that went around a few years ago that were supposedly by some lost 70s soul singer. I can't remember what his name was though. Can anyone remember because I would like to hear them again as they were pretty good




Pete23

The White Stripes saying they were brother and sister (instead of a divorced couple) to try and prevent bullshit gossip and get journalists to concentrate on the music.
Cardiacs married couple Tim and Sarah Smith saying they were brother and sister to try and get journalists to acknowledge they even existed.
Kiss coming from space and being superheros (that's the story I heard when I was 11).