The History of timeshard

1988-1991

Timeshard was formed in 1988 by Gobber, Sim and Angstrom.

As the very first acid house hit the streets our three intrepid chrononauts hit the stages of the UK with their bizarre technoid collision of sound. To give you some idea of the early Shard - they were compared to Vangelis, Motorhead, Brian Eno, Throbbing Gristle, the Radiophonic Workshop and Kraftwerk, among others.
The live set looked like the centre console of Doctor Who's tardis, hand made synth equipment vied with some pretty nifty, but out of fashion 'analogue' synths, with with the band members running around the circular set-up frantically re-locating cables from one module to another mid 'song' .

The whole performance seemed more like a chaotic sci-fi experiment than a traditional 'band' performance. There were hardly any other bands creating live electronic music like this, so the audience danced with a weird guilty look on their faces, like "I'm enjoying this but probably shouldn't be" the media consensus was - electronic music isn't real music kids!
The extended sound collages mutated across the hour long sets, these were interwoven woven with the themes which became early songs such as Atlantis and 25th century.

The major plus for the band was their disassociation from the standard origins of UK 'house' music, which developed in warehouses and the minds of the disillusion Thatcher's children. Shard music came out of the UK's free festival circuit - week long gatherings of the tribes where thousands of space-rock acts walked the earth. This gave the Shardians a chance to develop psychedelic trance music that would affect listeners on a mental AND a physical level while remaining unmolested by A&R men , or Indie loving electronix haiting journalists.
The Shardians released some of this early material on two (hard to get) albums 'Who Pilots the flying saucers' and 'Hyperborean dome temples of Apollo' which sold exclusively through festival stalls, head shops and specialised mail order places

Both of these albums are being re-released on TimeShard Records in the near future

1992-1995

This chunk of time began with the Shardians recording the album 'Crystal Oscillations' for Liverpool label 3Beat. Mainly recorded at Peermusic in London (a large music Publishers), with some bits recorded in a tiny studio in the Palace in Liverpool.
The band once again flouted convention by improvising a large portion of the album on arrival at the studio, notably on the title track -which is two overlaid takes of the band members playing 4 synths each (live), some of the synths were unfamiliar ones which had been foolishly left lying around by visiting session musicians.
The album was produced from 8pm to 8 am every night for a fortnight, during the day the studio was filled with an assortment of wanabee pop princesses and bizarre music biz 'characters' which made the change-overs at 8 pretty entertaining. At the end of each day the Shard checked the mixes in the comfort of the PeerMusic Managing Directors office- all shiny chrome and swivelly chairs expensive looking black wood, with a big tasty sound system. Of course he eventually realised what was going on and locked his door, heh heh !

3beat specialised in more commercial dance stuff so when we met up with Planet Dog supremo Michael Dog at a gig we were playing in London and he foolishly asked if we wanted to join his label we jumped ship sharpish, that's how we arrived on Planet Dog Records.
This was a better plan for us as Planet Dog Records was part of the space-tacular Megadog scene built up by Michael and Bob dog and many many others whose names I will remember in a short while, we were label mates with Eat Static, Children of the Bong and Banco De Gaia. Releasing Crystal Oscillations on Planet Dog meant that it was more in context as psychotronic wibble music rather than being grouped with the empty headed thumping and "wo-ho" samples kind of "dance" music that even now fills up the mediaverse.

Crystal Oscillations went down quite well with people who were interested in investigating alternative methods of interpreting "reality" munching on mushrooms, swapping abduction stories ... that kind of thing, meanwhile journalists who survived on the ephemeral pap that litters popular culture really didn't get it or want to get it, so we did a lot of interviews with sniffy journo's wondering when the hell we would get the coke out and stop talking about casting spells against the Romans, the magical layout of london and generating new memes via crystal powered audio devices. They really loved that a lot.

We toured like crazy people and off the back of the enormous wealth generated by crystal oscillations we bought a newspaper and a packet of fags

 

more soon ...