The Irma Vep Ensemble - Plays The Whole Of The Third Testament Which Is An Album By The Godz CD-R

So, here’s the low-down:

Way back in early 2020, Byron Coley pitched us the notion of recording a cover version of the entire Godz album “The Third Testament”. It was for this project he was cooking up, a bootleg vinyl record label called Hippie Johnnie Records through which he was aiming to release contemporary cover versions of the entire ESP back catalogue, 100 copies of each release for sale only at the Father Yod store in upstate Massachusetts.

The biggest issue was how to go about approaching the deeply stoned mayhem of the original, but we figured it’d be an interesting creative challenge if nothing else.

in order to take this on, we convened an AWOL remote supergroup of sorts made up of Edwin R Stevens (Irma Vep, Yerba Mansa etc etc), Andrew Cheetham (Desmadrados Soldades De Ventura, Richard Dawson, Kiran Leonard etc etc, Pete Um (his own bad self) and C Joynes.

While the song-based stuff was a little more straightforward, dealing with each of the tape-noise and collage works swiftly became about using the ideas behind the source material to conjure up some kind of audio homunculus, and then just letting the internal collective logic of our own versions take over as each of the pieces evolved and shape-shifted.

We worked on it all throughout the Plague Years of lockdowns I & II, recording stuff in our different homes while surrounded by the detritus of domestic life on the skids, remotely assembling the various overdubs, mixes and collages by working through a collective process of isolated conflict and parallel witchery that no-one can really recall now. It all became a bit obsessive during that obsessive time. We spent a lot of time alone, thinking ’this is absolutely unlistenable’. We all went a little insane.

Anyway, we come out the other side, send it off to Byron and don’t hear anything back. Turns out the whole lockdown thing had put Father Yod under quite some threat, and so in the cold light of 2021 a bootleg vinyl under-the-counter record store label dealing in illegal versions of the weirdest shit was probably not a strong business option.

After that sad denouement, the whole bag-of-tricks instinctively crawled off and hid away for a long long time. Occasionally we’d go give it a poke to see if it was still quivering, but generally the random asymmetrical balance of lo-fi outsider folk and dense headache-inducing digital/analogue tape blurt was a hard proposition to sell to most folks.

But now, thanks to the caring voices and coaxing hands at Chocolate Monk (UK, CDr) and Pome Pome Tones (US, cass), we’re delighted to announce that the entire package has crept back out into the sunlight once again. Half-a-decade later and a way down the road, this malformed little beast does seem to have grown into something with a unique coherence and energy all of its own. –The Irma Vep Ensemble