Dead Rat Orchestra – Pearl Fishers / Boat Notchers CD
Yes, it is out at last. By which of course we mean the wiggly whale penis chosen by Daniel Merrill to adorn the cover of the latest album by the free-roaming Dead Rat Orchestra.
This is available as a limited two disc audio-visual special edition, housed in a hand-stamped 20cmm x 20 cm card wallet, with a hand-stamped Kraft card inner wallet, three inserts and a phenakistoscope.
Audio CD
14-track CD with selections culled and collated from performances in Colchester, London and Milan. This is the first Dead Rat Orchestra CD to document the band’s long-held interest in traditional song, with a two mile swamp holler from North Carolina, a Spanish song of sewing arranged for violin, meat cleaver and wooden block and a harrowing tale of work experience gone bad lurking among the album’s many highlights.
Bonus disc
The two-disc audio/visual special edition of this album includes bonus “video” material, which can be viewed using the earliest recorded animation device – the phenakistoscope. The phenakistoscope was invented by Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau in 1832, based on the work of Michael Faraday and Peter Mark Roget. It is a printed cardboard disc with images separated by radial slots and is spun by hand, using a pin as an axis. The viewer looks through the slots into a mirror and a stroboscopic effect creates the illusion of animation.
For health and safety reasons, you’ll have to provide your own pin.
Although not officially released until 2015, we made up a batch of these for the trio’s London to Bristol canal tour, The Cut. We have more available exclusively from the webstore.