Funsville Memetic Laboratories
at oodletuz.fsnet.co.uk
Funsville Memetic Laboratories (FML) was established in 1987 in the ruined grounds of Funsville Unlimited Victimisation Theme Park, which had closed earlier that year due to "everything suddenly going all splat" (in the words of its proprietor Mr J. Haylo). Over the intervening period, or in plain language "since then", FML has gone from strength to strength, sez me. Fans of conspiracy theory will be especially pleased to hear that FML has already achieved world domination ... and you've never even heard of us!!
Set up initially as Lo-Fi Tapes, FML began life as a control post / waystation for teen angst and related memetic epiphenomena, with output in musical form. Its mission statement, except it was 1987 and there was no such thing as a mission statement, was something about a rally against the social injustice of forced conformity, while mixing in more personal stuff only in a highly controlled and darkly comical way. This was one memetic laboratory that wasn't going to sit on the stairs at parties going, "Oh God, I'm so depressed, no-one's ever been as depressed as me." It had to stand up. There wasn't room.
As the eighties grew into the nineties, so teen angst grew into, well, a-bit-older-than-teen angst, and both the musical and lyrical themes became more complex as new influences were stirred into the production vats. Perhaps the peak of manic oddity was reached in 1989-90 with the release of "Chart Fiddle Exposé's Wonderful World of Things" and "Hats Off to Chart Fiddle Exposé", C.F.E. being the fake band name under which FML's output was packaged until 1996.
The output of FML continued to progress, i.e. to simultaneously change and stay the same, as the nineties ran through the hourglass. Fake bands and their fake members have come and gone, but FML has stayed on the case. Over 16 hours of material have now been commercially released (by which I mean flogging copies of my tapes in pubs).
FML has always been a proud exponent of bedroom indie, and in order to achieve the authentic sound of same, the whole shebang is recorded and produced in one bedroom. Gradual improvements in financial circumstances have permitted many upgrades of our facilities. The first three and a half albums were originally recorded using two tape-decks and a Y adaptor, overdubbing one track at a time! This was upgraded to a four-track / stereo deck bouncing arrangement in 1988, following which came an echo unit with a long and shady past, graphic EQs and better keyboards, although still the same knackered old guitars and amps come to think of it. 1997 saw the introduction of our 8-track facility, and the ultimate luxury for bedroom indie was achieved in 1998 when FML moved location, allowing the FML2 studio to be set up in a different bedroom than I sleep in. Wow!
The new millennium saw radical changes at FML; in order to start putting a '2' at the start of the year we had to replace our writing apparatus - the old version wasn't Y2K compliant and insisted on calling it "nineteen-ninety-ten".
And so as nineteen-ninety-twelve rolls into nineteen-ninety-thirteen, FML is twenty albums on (and "Start Wrecked", and "Model Citizen Training" ... plus "Songs from the toilet bowl" which doesn't really count, and which snapped anyway) - now with CD freshness, and slightly bigger, deffer, phatter, and next-week's-cool-word-er then ever before.
We will also consider reclassifying our musical output; one suggesstion is that since Mr. Shifter et al are not merely "indpendent" but "underground", we should start calling it "bedroom undie". What do you reck'?