schlomp - 09 November 2008 02:58 PM
Personally I loved the little interlude from Shpongle Live… yu’know the Shpongle mask gabble about hairless creatures and women in boxes around Russia!! :D
This is what I’ve got from a bad quality recording… hopefully you lot can improve this / add your interpretation. Any more information about this? Was this possibly a certain Mr. Ram’s creation?
“There was a curious case that my grandfather was famous for the discovery of a pubic hair that had been lodged in a piece of amber and discovered in the northern planes of Borneo ... by a chimpanzee it was an extrooooordinary fact that the chimpanzee married the gorilla?s mother who had produced a hairless creature noooooo larger than the size of a small walnut! Lliving in a matchbox it was a curious fact that the sister of my aunt was a contortionist that lived in a box in Russia.
My grandfather who was a circus master, and a horrible man with a long whip, took my aunt in a box on a cart round the small villages of Russia. Showing, the many of the backward and inflicted morons that they could have sex with this poor woman in a box, the contortionist. Unfortunately, there were three holes in the box which you paid for.
If you picked the wrong hole, god help you. Because she had a horrible set of teeth, and was really set on vengeance….”
Often, while i am trying to set up a vocal sound or an effect, i will hand a cheap microphone to raj while he is lying on the sofa and tell him to “Keep talking!” (something at which he is remarkably adept 
In this particular instance i was fiddling around in Kyma, a great tool for making strange sounds, trying to quantize the formants to keyboard pitch (which gives you the strange vocoder sound), and i put it in record because it is very unpredictable… Well, we had drunk a nice bottle of wine and raj made up a whole series of ridiculous stories on the spot, never imagining that it would or could be used on the album… it was like listening to something out of a weird Roald Dahl novel…. a sort of ‘Uncle Oswald takes acid’ if you like…. i have hours of raj’s rambles… in fact maybe i should release a CD: “Raja’s Rambles” ....maybe for the boxset…. 
In the end, not a lot of it made the final cut (there is a good rap about “school days” tho’....) but we thought it might be nice to have the mask tell the story at the roundhouse show in the break before the encores, to stop people leaving…. it backfired a little, as people thought it was part of the main show, and complained that we didn’t play any encores! 
