Showing posts with label WYR?. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WYR?. Show all posts

Year Of The Pig

(US, UK & Japan 7" versions)



Punish the products but not the machine...
Sleeve - Front (US Version)
Sleeve - Back (US Version)
Vinyl:
All versions have WYR? labels on 'A' Side & Matador labels on 'B' Side

Insert - Front:
L-R: US, Japan & UK versions.
UK & US versions on white paper; Japan version (centre) on off-white paper.

Insert - Back:
L-R: US, Japan & UK versions have respective lyrics on back.
(See below for Ring image)




Stats - US Version:

Tracks:
Year of The Pig B/W Mustaa Lunta
Released: 2008
Label: Matador Records & What's Your Rupture OLE 831-7
Matrix A: OLE 831-7-A
Matrix B: OLE 831-7-B Salt
Pressing Info: (TBC)
Inserts: Image of farmer and pigs, with lyrics on reverse
Variants: No (known) variants


Stats - UK Version:

Tracks: Year of The Pig B/W Anorak City
Released: 2008
Label: Matador Records & What's Your Rupture OLE 830-7
Matrix A: OLE 830-7-A
Matrix B: OLE 830-7-B Salt
Pressing Info: (TBC)
Inserts: Image of farmer and pigs, with lyrics on reverse
Variants: No (known) variants


Stats - Japan Version:

Tracks: Year of The Pig B/W For My Friends
Released: 2008
Label: Matador Records & What's Your Rupture OLE 828-7
Matrix A: OLE 828-7-A
Matrix B: OLE 828-7-B Salt
Pressing Info: (TBC)
Inserts: Image of farmer and pigs, with lyrics on reverse
Variants: No (known) variants


UK & Japan Sleeves:

Sleeve - Front (UK Version)

Sleeve - Back (UK Version)

Sleeve - Front (Japan Version)
Sleeve - Back (Japan Version)




Notes:

Mixtape 4 Side B (Damian discussing lyrical themes - starts at 09.20):
We wrote it about soda pop and chips

General:
Whilst these are grouped together, they are actually three different records, each has a regionally specific edit of the title track and each has a unique 'B' side

(Cropped From) Announcement on LFG (July 22 2008):

Years of the Pig
In case you are confused:

US version: The aside is "Year of the Pig" edited by Eric Boucek, and a bside called "Mustaa Lunta" that G Beat wrote and recorded, and is very punk.







UK version: The Aside features an edit of YOTP by the prodigious Carlos Hernandez, and the bside features our cover of "Anorak City" by the great Another Sunny Day.






JAPANESE version: Features an edit of YOTP by Corona, anda bside called "For My Friends", which is a cover of the band Castlemusic, whose singer, you may recall, is the same Jennifer Castle, that does lead vocal on Year of the Pig.






COMPACT DISK version: Compiles not only all these 7" singles, but also the original 12" release, and its own bside ("The Black Hats"):

It is our belief that the bulk of each release will stay within its territory; it however, is also our belief that the effort must match the reward, in so much as the spoils are for the enterprising. It is unclear at the moment how many copies there are of each release. What is known is that 250 copies of the Japanese 7" currently reside in Barcelona, Spain.



Sleeve Notes:

The Three Little Pigs (From Wikipedia):
The Three Little Pigs is a fable featuring anthropomorphic pigs who build three houses of different materials. A big bad wolf is able to blow down the first two pigs' houses, made of straw and wood respectively, but is unable to destroy the third pig's house, made of bricks. Printed versions date back to the 1840s, but the story itself is thought to be much older. The phrases used in the story, and the various morals that can be drawn from it, have become embedded in Western culture.

The three little pigs leave their mother and go off to build three little houses...
They defeat the big bad wolf (a generic archetype of a menacing predatory antagonist) and live happily ever after...
In real life, things don't always work out the same as the fairy tales. This photo shows men taking a rest from hauling  the weight of  three pig carcasses.


The Rhinemaidens & Alberich

Illustration for Richard Wagner's ''The Ring'' by Arthur Rackham
The illustration shows the three Rhinemaidens, the ring and the two dwarves, Mime and Alberich

From Walkürepedia
In the opening of the Ring Cycle, Alberich is mocked by the Rhinemaidens for his futile attempts to catch them. He steals the Rhine gold from the Rhinemaidens, and renounces love so he can craft from it a ring to rule a world. With the ring Alberich takes control of the Nibelungs and forces them to mine gold for him. He plans to eventually enslave the world with his army and force women to sate his lust



Commodity Fetishism

YOTP Test Pressings:
Something odd about the one on the left - ''The Black Hats'' was the 'B' side to the 12"...


''Year Of The Rat''

Only a broken mind can understand that life's a trap when you're a rat.
Sleeve - Front

Sleeve - back

Vinyl - Printed labels
See below for stamped variants









Stats: 

Tracks: Year Of The Rat B/W First Born
Year: 2009
Label: Whats Your Rupture?
Matrix A ?0109 A
Matrix B ?0109 B

Pressing Info: 
3000 12"s
300 With white labels, most stamped, some with and without sleeves
No Test Pressings
(Thank you to Kevin Pedersen for the pressing info!)

Inserts:
Lyric sheet as above


Variants:
  • Regular - Printed labels, picture sleeve
  • Stamped - White labels hand-stamped in black ink, picture sleeve
  • 'Test Press' - Same as above stamped version, but with generic white 'DJ' sleeve and no insert. Made available at shows before the artwork was available, subsequently misidentified by 2nd hand market and sold as test pressings.
  • Blue Stamp & Other Stamp Variants - White labels. A handful are stamped with blue, rather than black ink, there might also be a few with purple ink. The colours don't have a use / meaning and maybe just came about because the black ink was running out. The one pictured below came with a picture sleeve. There are also a few with blank labels that should have been stamped, but got missed...
Stamped labels - 'A' Side

Stamped labels - 'B Side'


Blue Stamp - there seem to be a handful of these out there.

'Test Press'(i.e. Vinyl and labels same as other stamped variants, but with generic DJ sleeve and no insert.
The one on the left is the special 'upside down logo' variant...)

From LFG Jan 23 2009Finally, some of you may have noticed that in New York and Philadelphia, a few copies of the Year of the Rat 12" accidentally slipped into existence. If you got one, you are lucky. The rest will be released with a real cover and etc around the same time as No Epiphany, and we should have both in time for the UK tour in March.






Notes:

From FU Merch Table: 3rd in the series of releases coinciding with the Chinese Zodiac. 'Rat' is a Krautrock-influenced 12 minute blast with a massive finish. Recorded in the same studio as "What's The Story, Morning Glory?" in London and mixed in Toronto. The b-side is an original which treads somewhere between ugly glam and an FU take on Thin Lizzy style guitar harmonies.




Mixed Metaphors (Years of Rats):
Rats have appeared several times in the Fucked Up story; a few previous examples are outlined below, along with the usual cut and pasted random quotes. Some might be relevant to this release.

In their expanded interpretation of Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of social alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture.[1]
Dream of life on the other side.

The "Baiting The Public" artwork was discussed in a LFG post dated December 2010:
The front image is meant to be a metaphor for what we thought we were in punk, and what punk was in the world (we were really into punk at that point) - a pack of rats running over a proper looking young woman in bed.
The proper looking young woman is asleep, her body is present, but her mind, if it's active at all, is in a dream state, she's oblivious to the rats running over her in the real world. The LFG post goes on to describe the record as being a tribute to the actionist and situationist movements - the following is cropped from Wikipedia:

 Another important concept of situationist theory was... the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.[1]

Hunch my back and bear my teeth,
I'll kill you to get the things I need.

"Dance Of Death" repeated the use of sleeping woman imagery, this time the subject is passively accepting death and the song is about...
...the imperialist lifestyle and how its been perfect and reproduced to such a dazzling extent, that people within it are convinced that it is the best way, and that they love it. Its like Stockholm Syndrome, when a captive begins to love and revered the captor. The Harbinger’s spiders laid their eggs inside all of our heads, and convinced us to keep dancing in the muck, because we love it.
"Year of The Rat" seems to take on these themes, in describing the rat race from the rat's perspective.


The push for more provokes the greed,
I struggle for the space to breathe.
Tails connect and pull apart
Friends whose tails strangle the hearts
of friends whose tails are wrapped around
The necks of friends together bound.

Moving on to the Fucked Up / Haymaker Split , which combined rat and Nazi imagery, this time probably referencing state propaganda and the Pied Piper of Hamelin...




The Pied Piper also featured in the first ever post on the Looking For Gold Site, the post is copied below, for posterity:


RATS

And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeking
In fifty different Sharps and flats

Welcome to the FUCKED UP log.



Going back a step, the Haymaker split references Philip K Dick's "Black Iron Prison", which could describe the imperialist lifestyle:
Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.

This ball of fear that grows together,
The want for freedom becomes the tether.
A thousand rats and appetites pull,
A thousand ways to bind it tighter.

Take my chance to grab an inch,
When something snares me I don't flinch.
When it pulls I just pull back,
I feel my liberty losing slack.


The fade out on the YOTR includes the "You'd better be prepared to pull the trigger" quote from John Mcain, which maybe expands the rat-race theme to its natural conclusion on the world stage. Likewise the "47   05" on the above insert might reference May 1947, the start of the cold war arms race. Or maybe not.




Reaching up to touch the sky,
The sun, the centre of my mind.

The End
The last ever post on Looking for Gold was David Eliade's top 10 list of Fucked Up Songs. Baiting the Public and Year of The Rat are 1 & 2. (It might not be the last post forever, but it was the last post before a long break)


And Finally
Rats Love Music, became a real thing with the release of this record (according to the credits). Rats Love Music is a subsidary of Hidden World Enterprises












One last thing...






''Year Of The Pig''

SECURITY BY OCTAVIO ST LAURENT. EXPERIENCED IN THE TRADITION OF WILSIM PUBOLOGY. ALL INSPIRATION FROM DAVID ELIADE. (Extract from credits)
Front Panel - Front
(WYR? variant has two separate panels rather than a jacket)

Front Panel - Back
(YOTP lyrics)

Back Panel - Front
(WYR? variant has two separate panels rather than a jacket)

Back Panel - Back
("The Black Hats" Lyrics + Credits)

Vinyl - 'A' Side
 (WYR? Variant)

Vinyl - 'A' Side
(WYR? Variant)





Stats #1: (WYR? US - Stamped labels)

Tracks: Year Of The Pig B/W The Black Hats
Year: 2008
Label: Whats Your Rupture?
Matrix A PO307 A re PGold
Matrix B PO307 B Salt

Pressing Info: 
First press of  3500
1 Set of 30 rejected test pressings
1 Set of approved test pressings, indistinguishable from the produced 12"

Inserts:
No Inserts


Stats #2: (Matador - Stamped Labels)

Tracks: Year Of The Pig B/W The Black Hats
Year: 2008
Label: Matador
Matrix A OLE 828-1A ?0307 A re 17863-1
Matrix B OLE 828-1B ?0307 B Salt 7863-2

Pressing Info: 
Matador press of  1000
10(ish) RTI test pressings

Inserts:
No Inserts


Stats #3: (Vice UK - Printed Labels)

Tracks: Year Of The Pig B/W The Black Hats
Year: 2008
Label: Vice
Matrix A VICE-006-A2   SS   JB
Matrix B VICE-006-B1   SS   JB

Pressing Info: 
Vice press of 500
5-10 test pressings

Inserts:
No Inserts

(Thank you to Kevin Pedersen for the YOTP pressing info!)











Variants:

1. What's Your Rupture? press: (White stamped labels, separate double-sided front and back panels instead of jacket)
2. Matador press: (White stamped labels, separate double-sided front and back panels instead of jacket)
3. Vice press: (Printed labels, jacket with same 'front' imagery as above panels, ineer sleeve with same 'back' imagery as above panels.

* Matador & Vice variants have WYR? credits


Sleeve Variants - (Click on picture to enlarge):
Top:
WYR? (separate front & back panels)
Middle: Matador (separate panels, as above, but with Matador info + barcode sticker on back panel)
Bottom: Vice (Jacket)


Sleeve Variants - (Click on picture to enlarge):
Top: WYR? (stamped labels)
Middle: Matador (stamped labels)
Bottom: Vice (printed labels)

Printed labels from the Vice variant




Notes:





Sex work, the "oldest profession" has always been one of those tricky jobs made into a languid moral debate that places practitioners into the dangerous no-mans land of legal limbo. Like the war on drugs, prostitution is never going to disappear, and attempts made to its further criminalization only make sex work extremely dangerous for those who do it.

We're putting out "Year of the Pig" in June, which will address some of the issues brought up in 2007 surrounding of sex work, specifically the trial of Robert Pickton in British Columbia, following the disappearance of more than 60 prostitutes. All too often victims are made the scape goats, chosen to characterize and wear the sin or moral outrage society chooses to place on particular activities. While it is prostitutes who are arrested, raped and murdered trying to make a living, they are also made to internalize and launder our own guilt and shame surrounding these issues.

SPOC, the Sex Professionals of Canada, work to make prostitution (which is not illegal in Canada) a safer occupation for its practitioners. They work to decriminalize those aspects of sex work that remain illegal (read the article), work to organize prostitutes toward activism and maintain a "bad date list" as a safety measure against bad johns.

Hard issues like sex work, drugs, poverty are issues that people are often afraid to face head on, yet usually have direct effects on people who they make live or work most closest to. SPOC deals with these issues every day, and we are proud to make this attempt to support their work. So please flood the block for this benefit:





"Pig Public Statement"  (LFG Post - June 13 2007) 

In 2007, the good become superior and the bad become worse. The enlightened continue on their path to understanding and contentment. Take a stand, speak your mind during this Pig year."

The theme for Year of the Pig is exploitation and violence against women, using prostitution as a main symbol. We recorded this while the Robert Pickton trial is picking up here in Canada - Pickton is a farmer from British Columbia who has been charged with the murder of 26 prostitutes from one of the poorest districts in Canada. We feel that violence against women, represented here by the issue of prostitutes rights in particular, is an issue that is still taboo, and rights for sex workers is an issue that people are still afraid to look at head on, and deal with in a meaningfull way. Sexism exists everywhere and as we've seen in the Pickton case, it can far too easily manifest as abuse, rape and murder shut out from the public eye. This violence is more easily accomodated when working prostitutes aren't protected by the full scope of the law in their workplaces, and when their role exists outside of the purview of our collective morality. In this way, we also view violence against prostitutes as symtomatic of our society's tendency to try and launder our collective guilt and shame through a third party, in this case prostitutes. They exist as a special part of our culture where we can lash out at them, of our own shame and guilt with sexual issues of shame and possesion, and blame and exploit them, instead of dealing with those issues ourselves. Sexism and violence agaisnt women exist, and as long as there are classes of society that we keep beneath our collective moral societal obligations, those classes will bear the full brunt of the hatred and fear we can dish out. We also with to state that "Year of the Pig" is not the attempt to condemn Robert Pickton, or any other individual specifically for any specific crime - the scope of these issues are broader than isolated incidents. The habitual compartmentalization of these sorts of crimes is part of the problem - we wish to state that sexism and violence persist not simply due to the actions of a few deviant criminals, but because as a whole we refuse to properly deal with these issues.

We wrote "Year of the Pig" according to the spacial and spiritual rules laid out in the Chinese Zodiac. We do this once a year – last year was "Year of the God", next year is "Year of the Rat". It is a special process we only bring out for these yearly rousing recording sessions. It is a 60 year cycle, so accordingly there will be 60 of these 12"'s, by us or by the bands we pass it down to. The combination element for this year was gold, so (as usual), we tried to surround ourselves with as much gold as possible in the studio – a few people came up who had fronts in their mouths, and we all had to borrow our parents jewelry. The lights from the studio were cascading off all the pieces in the room. The Heaven element for this year was fire, so we also managed to put up a huge fire in the middle of the floor. We did the drum tracks only with the fire, because we had to move the set-up onto the roof of the building. For us recording is all about balance basically – we usually try now to have certain people come in to lay down the area in a way we don't really understand – we just sit there and eat handfuls of salvia while these dowsers come in and point to what instruments are ready, you've got these geosophists pointing us in certain directions, sigils are going up all over the place, it can get pretty real in the year of the fourth trine.

Fucked Up, David, Octavio, Hail Wilsim Publogy June 22 2007 CE



"Friday" - (LFG Post - September 14 2007) 





Hi it's me, Octavio. I have no life and they are making me update this on a Friday night. I have to work early tommorow morning anyhow at the stapler factory, so I'm not going out tonight anyhow.

This zine The New York Times reviewed (sort of) Year of the Pig. You can find it here. They couldn't say our name, but we're pretty sure they were talking about us, and not the Japanese band "Messed Up" that was on Blurred Records and is pre-JABARA:

That’s the name of a monstrous new 18-minute song by a neo-hardcore band from Toronto. And the name of the band? Well, suffice it to say that if newspaper coverage were a priority, the members might have called themselves Messed Up instead. You can find “Year of the Pig” on iTunes and elsewhere. The 1980s Portland, Ore., band Poison Idea is an obvious influence, although Poison Idea wasn’t known for composing multipart epics about sexism and serial killing and the meat industry. In any case, this is an unreasonably stubborn song, building momentum slowly as the guest singer Jennifer Castle murmurs the lyrics (“Pigs at the trough show no fear”) and Pink Eye, the band’s lead singer, roars them (“Pigs at the trough getting fat!”). The band trudges slowly along for six minutes, then builds momentum, then lurches forward, riding a relatively sleek groove as Pink Eye declaims the words (“Ashamed of the pig in our head/Ashamed, so we kill ’em instead”) as the band stretches up and surges forward and, finally, collapses in a heap. This is the second installment in a series inspired by the Chinese zodiac; with any luck, “Year of the Rat” is up next. (By Kalefa Sanneh)




"Interview" - (LFG Post - January 03 2008) 

AU- with the Year of the Pig release the band embarked on a 18+ minute opus not unlike what we found on 2004's Looking for Gold which also featured a 17+ minute song featuring all things unconventional. Can you tell us a little about this process and how it all came together?

10KM- Those two tunes don't really share that much. We scripted Looking for Gold to be really long, made sure it had a lot of parts and gaps that you could separate. I also think LFG is a lot more in line with the rest of our catalogue in that its loud throughout and is based on a conventional instrument set up. We were able to shorten it easily into "Invisible Leader" as a result. Year of the Pig started just as a 4 note riff I used to play onstage when I was setting my gear up and it just became a long song because thats how much music we wanted there to be. It was the most fun song to work through we've done. We'd never worked closely with other musicians before, and it was great to work the song out in practice with Max, who played organ and keyboards. We wrote sort of a skeleton of the song in practice and then fleshed a lot of the parts out in the studio, like a lot of the timing and most of the guitar stuff thats on the song.








Sleeve Notes:


"Artworx" - (LFG Post - December 27 2010) 



The art on both sides of this 12" is by Ferdinand Hodler, a 19th century Swiss painter. This was a tricky record to choose cover art for, because it deals with an issue that doesn't really lend itself to subtle representation (prostitution) and we also didn't really want to go the literally route by putting some slaughtered pig on the cover of the album (although we did that for one of the 7" versions of this song because it was a sick photo). We spent a few days in the library until we came across this Hodler piece which fits really well because it kind of alludes to prostitution through public sex (because there are a bunch of men and women sleeping in a public place) but also the central guy seems to be about to get whats coming to him. The central black figure is obviously meant to connote Death and this fits the theme of the album, which is that the problem with our conception of sex work is that the responsibility for carrying with social taboo is with the worker and not the consumer. The cover is meant to allude to a get-back wherein the consumer is meant to pay the ultimate price, not the prostitute. We thought the art and the lyrics on this album were pretty cohesive, but lots of reviewers just thought the song was about animal rights :(.