The Bastard Sons of Dennis: Horsemon

Horsemon is the name of a brand new track added to the album Cherry Smoke Empire by The Bastard Sons of Dennis. It is quite unlike any of the other tracks on the album in that it is an electronic dance music piece. In a sense it is not particularly new either, as it is the earliest recording of The Bastard Sons of Dennis. Horsemon dates right back to the summer of 1992!

Because Horsemon is so different to the rest of the Cherry Smoke Empire album, it is in a sense a bonus track and has been placed as the penultimate offering. The final track on the album, the epilogue to The Furniture, is most definitely in the style of a bonus track.

Horsemon is a highly unusual piece of EDM in that it is completely improvised. It was recorded in the old Silent Running Studios. Q.Wim played around on Nicodemus and Yuri operated the machines.

The whole thing was a simple loop on the Atari 1040. The Yamaha TG33 is panned centre to right and the Kawai K4r is panned centre to left. The E-mu Pro-Cussion is panned wide left to right and the Akai S900 plays the bassline straight down the middle. As the piece develops, you can hear new parts being added to the sequencer. The rather blorty keyboard theme on the TG33 was recorded into the sequencer, quantised and left be, without the wrong notes being removed.

Despite this piece being rather messy, we felt that it had enough artistic merit to be included on the Cherry Smoke Empire album as a bonus track. Some of the musical ideas and the main guitar theme that Q.Wim plays are fantastic. The sound isn’t as great as it might be, but if you consider it was salvaged from a 25-year-old cassette, it’s not so bad.

There is something of a tale behind this curiously-named piece. We always thought the name sounded like a Jamaican word, meaning ‘postman’. However, when Q.Wim and Yuri were searching for a name to call themselves (a perennial dilemma for most bands), they started out by putting together their two Chinese astrological signs, a horse and a monkey. This was the name that appeared on the posters of their first live performances and pre-dates the entire notion of Dennis. When saving the file on the old studio Atari, the filename would only permit up to eight characters. And so it was that ‘HorseMonkey’ became truncated to ‘Horsemon’, and that was the name that always stuck.

If you would like to listen to Horsemon from the Cherry Smoke Empire album among the pages for The Bastard Sons of Dennis here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you prefer to listen to Horsemon at Bandcamp, where you can also download it for free or for whatever value you choose, please click here instead.