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A Musical Inventing Shed

We don’t consider ourselves primarily a performing band. Of course, from time to time we do step out onto the stage – usually for a good cause like Oxjam or a fundraiser for humanitarian relief in Syria we helped to organise in aid of Medecins Sans Frontieres – but typically we like to tinker with songs and production in our small studio.

Our DAW of choice is Reason 12, and we like it because it has a very analogue feel and workflow in a digital domain. Added to that we have piles of vintage keyboards and drum machines and a wall of guitars, basses and similar stringed instruments. Augmenting the Roland v-drums are odd percussion instruments we’ve collected from here and there, including a West African balafon we used to great effect through a digital delay pedal on ‘I Hear Drums’. When all else fails, we’ll rummage through the kitchen or garage for something to hit or shake to make a sound that can be digitally manipulated later.

There are few rewards for independent music makers these days, but the joy of making a track to be proud of remains a compelling reason to keep composing and recording.

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Bird Shot: A Song About Repeating History

A scene from the Bird Shot video, in which we montage imagery from Battleship Potemkin with our own ersatz news footage. Dean plays the reporter while Chris plays a war victim in a homage to Eisenstein’s famous scene

‘Bird Shot’, the new single by The Sighs of Monsters takes aim at Russian president Vladimir Putin, the latest crazed despot to threaten the world with annihilation. From a satirical fictionalised newsroom of state propaganda channel RT, the video sets Battleship Potemkin imagery against the war crimes of
Russia’s new Tsar.

The brutality of the Tsar’s army portrayed in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Soviet film is one of the founding narratives of modern Russia, so the juxtaposition holds a mirror up to their own brutality in Ukraine today.

“Was it worth the blood and the pain?” the lyrics ask, as they poetically examine the mindset of “your mad king on the grounds, writing insane”.

The band’s lyrics typically deal with the personal. “We are not a political band,” says bassist Brett Houston-Lock, “but when a world event takes on a moral and existential dimension such as this, as artists, we cannot stay silent. It is not political, it is humanitarian.”

“Growing up in South Africa during the apartheid years has given me some insight into societies led by paranoid leaders who have the police, the military and the state media at their disposal,” says Houston-Lock, “so I think I understand at least some of the dynamics at play in Russia today, and must have in previous societies led by maniacs with a mad plan for the world.”

Previously the band released a single called “After Charlie” in response to the murders of Jews in Paris in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Tackling antisemitism, the song pointed to growing attacks on Jews in Europe and noted “this is not occupied Europe in 1941. This is the present day. This is contemporary”.

“We certainly don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of the increasingly polarised and identity-driven politics poisoning social media these days, but we live in this world and sometimes we have to speak up,” he adds.

The image above shows a scene from the Bird Shot video, in which we montage imagery from Battleship Potemkin with our own ersatz news footage. Dean plays the reporter while Chris plays a war victim in a homage to Eisenstein’s famous scene. The video is set at a fictitious TV News channel as things unravel for the mad tyrant.

Watch the video for Bird Shot on YouTube, or get the single from Bandcamp.