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| Sleeve - Front |
Pleasure on the edge of a knife
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| Sleeve - Back |
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| Vinyl - 'A' Side |
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| Vinyl - 'B' Side |
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| Lyric Sheet - Front |
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| Lyric Sheet - Back The fountain of youth |
Stats:
General:
Tracks: Byrdesdale Garden City B/W Into The Light
Released: 2011
Label: Matador Records OLE 960-7
Matrix A: OLE-960-7 A GOLDEN
Matrix B: OLE 060-7 B GOLDEN
Pressing Info: 2000? TBC
Inserts: Regular insert as pictured above
Variants: No variants
Notes:
Extracted From LFG Post (June 28 2011):
As I've written on here before, this collection of records is meant to act as a prologue to David Comes to Life... to describe the characters and the setting in a bit more detail.
Byrdesdale Spa UK:
Fictional settlement available information indicates an amalgamation of UK Mill Town, Garden City, and possibly Model Village. The presence of a Spa, suggests an earlier settlement.
Extract From TV Report:Originally envisioned by its founders as a utopian garden city, Byrdesdale has since fallen on hard times. Here the seasons never change, the people shrug like weeds, the angry thud of steel-toed boots echoing through the streets...
Damian Abraham Speaking in NPR Interview:
"The first act is reflective of the way that our band tends to have an idealized, rose-colored idea of that time in England," Abraham says. "There were a huge amount of problems, but even those problems seem fascinating. It was the first rise of the working class and the real last stand, unfortunately, [before] the conservatism of the next decade."
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| Devil Worship |
Misinterpretation:
Just as it was possible to identify references to classical elements in each of the characters in the other prologue records, three elements can be contrived out of the place name:
Byrdes (noun misp) - warm-blooded egg-laying vertebrate animal of a class distinguished by the possession of feathers wings and a beak and typically by being able to fly. AIR
Dale (noun) - a valley especially in northern England. EARTH
Spa (noun) - a mineral spring considered to have health-giving properties. a place or resort with such a spring. WATER
The Factory:
How long have you worked at the light-bulb factory?
Three or four years. Or like six decades, it’s hard to keep track.
How’d you get the job?
I got the job through my friend David. After the band started I needed a job that I could work hard while I was here, and then take time off to travel with Fucked Up. Working in a factory is the perfect thing because you can plow through days on end working if you have the stamina.
Can you tell me more about the coworkers?
Imagine a lightbulb before it’s turned on. No one wants to work in a lightbulb factory — so you can imagine the paths people took to get there. Good people but not the types you’d want to get too involved in.
What’s the atmosphere like?
I had a friend who worked in a d-hook factory. She mentioned long shifts, these same sorts of older coworkers, lots of smoking. How long are your shifts?
What are your duties?
Dale (noun) - a valley especially in northern England. EARTH
Spa (noun) - a mineral spring considered to have health-giving properties. a place or resort with such a spring. WATER
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| Air, Earth, Water |
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| Fire |
The Factory:
Extracts from interview with Factory Worker:
How long have you worked at the light-bulb factory?Three or four years. Or like six decades, it’s hard to keep track.
How’d you get the job?
I got the job through my friend David. After the band started I needed a job that I could work hard while I was here, and then take time off to travel with Fucked Up. Working in a factory is the perfect thing because you can plow through days on end working if you have the stamina.
Can you tell me more about the coworkers?
Imagine a lightbulb before it’s turned on. No one wants to work in a lightbulb factory — so you can imagine the paths people took to get there. Good people but not the types you’d want to get too involved in.
What’s the atmosphere like?
Hazy. Have you seen the movie The Machinist? It’s like that. It’s a real trip because lightbulbs are one of those elemental commodities that have been in production for such a long time, with the same essential design principles — the lightbulbs that were being built 100 years ago are basically the same ones being built today. Which means there hasn’t been a lot of updates in machinery at the shop either — my plant was built probably 60 or 70 years ago and there are parts of it and machines in there I really can’t think about. It’s gassy, there are sounds you hear that you can never figure out where they come from, there are chemicals everywhere. It’s a really tentative place — people act like every day is the last one there, after years of days like that. Making lightbulbs needs a lot of corrosive chemicals, so there is that too. Remnants of arsenic, mercury, you know they are there. It isn’t a healthy place.
I had a friend who worked in a d-hook factory. She mentioned long shifts, these same sorts of older coworkers, lots of smoking. How long are your shifts?
It varies. There are lots of ways to configure your schedule. As I was saying before, while there are administrative types that keep the 9-5 thing, the deeper you get into the plant, the darker it gets, you get people who seem like their feet are cemented into the ground, you start seeing cobwebs in the creases in their clothes. If I know I’m only going to be in town for a few weeks I put my head down and work. Sometimes I do the “Da Vinci” rep, where it’s a 16-hour shift, followed by 11 hours off, followed by a 16 hour shift, 11 hours off — for as long as i can stand it, usually about 6 or 7 shifts tops. You really lose track of time obviously, but you start to oscillate through society even — taking the bus the wrong way through rush hour traffic at 5am on the way home, asleep at 5pm — you can really lose your footing if you aren’t careful, just become this unhinged lunatic floating through some strange semblance of of time.
What are your duties?
Different things, but usually I’m fitting filled bulbs into their screw bases. It’s really boring. Top bulbs come along the line and I make sure they get placed into the right base so they can be fastened properly down the line. I get in, sit down and wait for the bulbs. I have no idea where they come from, or where they go. I know that we get a lot of the individual parts outsourced — filaments, sleeves, vitrit, those are made in Bangalore or something, and probably assembled somewhere in the plant here.
Are you able to zone out at all, or does it require constant attention?
Are you able to zone out at all, or does it require constant attention?
It’s hard to say. When you think you are paying attention you wake up and it’s four hours later. It’s this Zen thing almost; you can zone out while paying attention. I just need to place the bulbs in the bases, bulbs in the bases, bulbs in the bases. I zone out paying attention to that mantra for hours and hours..
Do you like your job?
Do you like your job?
Well, to a certain extent — but it hasn’t turned me into a vampire yet. I try to arrange my shifts so they end early in the morning so that when I leave everything is already bustling and it forces me to immediately start to re-connect — get a coffee at a busy shop, get the paper in the morning. It isn’t like the plant is this giant room filled with blinding light. It’s the opposite — it’s gray, dark, dingy. You’d imagine if you didn’t know otherwise, that we were making broken lightbulbs, because that’s what the place looks like.
Extracts from interview with 'French Zine' (LFG Post Aug 28 2007):
Extracts from interview with 'French Zine' (LFG Post Aug 28 2007):
What keeps you busy in daily life?Well, I work in a small room at the bottom of a lightbulb factory. Its my job to make sure the filaments, which are actually tiny coils, stay coiled up during the heating process. When you are affixing the coiled filaments to the base of the bulb, you're using a lot of heat because you're basically soldering them on there. I've got to take random checks to make sure the filaments are still coiled. I have to basically sit infront of this massive microscope all day watching these tiny coils go by on a converbelt, because we're making so many bulbs each day, our plant alone is putting out more than 8000 a day. It's really boring, and i've got to be in the sub-basement because at that point in the manufacturing process the filaments can't be exposed to any light, so instead of installing fixtures to keep too much light out on the ground floor, the filament-checking room is way in this creepy bottom corner, because the plant was built in 1889, just a few years after lightbulbs were invented. So basically i do that during the day and try my best to stay out of any light during the rest of the day. Its like if you watch movies at your job at the video store all day, you don't want to watch movies in your spare time, well its the same with light, honestly I just get bored of it.
What's the role of David Eliade in Fucked Up?David is the coiled filament himself. Our job is to sit infront of giant microscopes to make sure he doesn't come unraveled. He is the electric DNA at the bottom corner of our music factory.
Is there a connection between David Eliade and the song "David Comes to Life"?David told us that he was born with 3 strands of DNA instead of just 2. He said the third one was covered with an osmium coating, and made him the first living cyborg. When he came to life it was like he was born backwards, so we had to write the song in reverse order and upside down by having some people hold mirrors to mirrors in our practice space. Decoding the upsidedown backwards lyrics was a huge pain in the ass. David claims to be able to do all these crazy things like see gas and oxygen molecules. We sometimes think he's kind of retarded, but then also like a wierd genius. No one has ever met his father, if you know what i'm saying. Anyhow, the connection is that "David Comes to Life" is about jesus christ.
