UPDATE: 04/02/2021.

The INVADER vinyl 1000 copy limited edition is now out - and sold out within 48 hours.

The audio on the vinyl was re-edited and remixed from this Bandcamp version - pretty much every track changed in some ways, sometimes quite a lot, some material disappeared completely - mostly the more obscure elements - and new material was added. I guess it ended up about 75% the same.

And.... the whole thing was professionally mastered [thanks to Richard Scott in Berlin] which this one here isn't... so the sound on the vinyl is altogether sharper and more immediate. The Bandcamp version here is my home-produced DIY Version 1.0. [this page is called Test Recordings for a reason]. And the vinyl is the shinier and altogether more user-friendly Version 2:0. And it has a great cover.

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This album is an edit of a 4 hour mix I made for the opening of the '1000' exhibition by my friend, the French artist Invader, which took place in La Générale, Paris, 07.06.2011. La Generale is an enormous old ( 19th century) electricity substation on the Avenue Parmentier in the east of Paris. It now houses an artist's co-operative. The space inside is huge, about the size of three tennis courts, 80 metres or so from front to back, 30 metres tall, a massive industrial hangar with an elaborated ironwork and glass front.

I have always liked big stereo spreads, echoes across valleys, that kind of thing, so I put one speaker at one end of the room (above the door) and one at the other ( in the diagonally opposite corner of the back wall, about 100 metres away) to have the largest stereo separation possible, and I mixed it so that different things happened at different ends of the space, sometime s overlapping, sometimes coming together, sometimes echoing, sometimes just in random pairings.

The sounds were a big collage of songs featuring the words ' Space Invaders' and processed sounds of vintage 8-bit games machines, PacMan, Tank, pinball machines, digital audio junk video game beeping through reverb units, and so on.

I tried to make the audio space sound and feel like a sort of warped version of a visit to a seaside games arcade when you were a teenager - with a radio station that only played space Invader songs.

With crowds of people moving around and chatting to each other, looking at the Invader exhibits in what was essentially a giant reverb tank, there was alot of hubbub, the opposite of 'background noise' - it was often impossible to hear the details unless you went near the speakers.

But then there would be a sudden silence and you would hear a beep beep beep coming from 50 meters away, or a blast of rockabilly from somewhere above the entrance.

This is a ( heavily ) edited version of the material from that evening. It retains most of the doctored/edited 'Space Invader'' songs from other artist, some of the left/ right stereo shenanigans, and is different to the original in that it is necessarily more compressed, and contains less 'space' between events.

I have removed all of the long silences and most of the long 30/60 second reverb tails that were a feature of the 2011 mix, so you lose the sense of bleeps and songs coming at you from different places at random intervals, and sounds fading away over time, or melting into the noise of the crowds, that there was on the evening itself. But, as a wise man once said, this is a record, not an art exhibition.

This version online here is 'today's version'- weird sounds for a weird time.
I will tidy it up later, add some extra material, correct some pixels here and there, master it, generally smarten it up it up abit, and hopefully release it on vinyl in a few months time.

Thank you Monsieur Envahisseur!

Andrew Sharpley,

April 2020

Sound / Andrew Sharpley
Visual / Invader