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Go buy the tape over at Knuckes on Stun!

https://knucklesonstun.bandcamp.com

About the album

i initially had this idea as something bands would do. A first band writes a song and records it, and then without letting anyone hear the recording, just one band member teaches it to the member of another band, but in person and they don't play the recording for the person they are teaching it to. The only thing that gets to be written down is the lyrics. They then teach the rest of their band and record their version, and repeat the process to see how different the song comes out at the end. i don't have access to a studio to be recording bands with or the resources to make that happen, so i decided to try it with home recording/solo artists for a simpler version. Still took years to get it to logistically work but here it is.

About the song

I took a book called "Japanese Death Poems" that is a collection of, well, Japanese death poems with me to go on a camping/music festival thing I was playing with another band in like 2017 or 2018. We took a bunch of drugs in the woods and I was reading these poems, and one that stuck out to me is by one of Japans most famous poets, Issa. The poem is:

"Tarai kara
tarai ni utsuru
chimpkunkan"

the translation of the book was:

"From one basin
to another -
stuff and nonsense"

which made me think that the word "chimpunkan" translated to "stuff and nonsense". I thought having a word that specifically means "stuff and nonsense" was very funny, and I just kept using it constantly. I took the meaning of the poem in that time to mean, from birth to death, life is just stuff and nonsense. My takeaway that weekend was more or less, life is meaningless, so who cares? which was how i was feeling in a lot of ways at the time. By the time I was writing the song in 2020, I was feeling pretty different about life though.

i've since learned that a better translation to "chimpunkan" is along the lines of "the gibberish sounds you hear hearing a conversation in a language you don't understand" which changes the way I think of the poem really. I take the poem now to mean more of from birth to death, you don't really understand it. i like that version better and think it fits more into Issa's outlook from other poems of his I've read (but who knows, maybe they're all weird translations missing the point)

Everything is dumb so I'm "writing" dumb "songs" on dumb garage band based off a dumb algorithm that gives you dumb lyrics when you text a dumb band name to the dumb number. I should have called this "band" Dumb Numbers instead of Krime Slugs.


Spray painting slug logo by GhostBat

www.ghostbatart.com

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